Here’s how animals behaved during the solar eclipse
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with stories about what’s going on in the world. This is a great idea because you get exposure to all kinds of new words and topics that you might not otherwise hear about in English.
There was a big story in North America recently: a solar eclipse ran through Mexico, the middle and eastern parts of the U.S., and eastern Canada. A lot of attention has been paid to what people did during the eclipse. But today I want to talk about what animals did during the eclipse.
This eclipse, just by chance, passed over six zoos. So that gave animal researchers a lot of information on how animals behave during an eclipse. That’s what we’ll talk about today—get ready to learn some new animal names!
In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you how to use the English expression “quiet down”—and you’ll learn the names of two of the school bus drivers I had when I was a kid. That’s fun.
This is lesson 672, so that means JR, our producer, has uploaded the full lesson content to PlainEnglish.com/672. That’s where you’ll find the transcripts, translations, quizzes, and other exercises. PlainEnglish.com/672.
Let’s get started.
How zoo animals behaved during the eclipse
About a month ago, on Monday, April 8, a sliver of North America experienced a total solar eclipse.
A solar eclipse happens when the moon gets in the way of the sun’s light. In a total solar eclipse, the moon completely blocks the sun and darkness falls in the middle of the day.
Each eclipse is visible in just a small part of the Earth’s surface. The path of totality is a sliver of the Earth’s surface where the sun’s light is totally blocked by the moon. Areas outside the narrow path of totality can see partial darkness—but it’s not the same.
Total solar eclipses are rare. They’re visible for only a few minutes, and they’re only visible in a small area. So that means, it’s not well known how animals react to the total midday darkness of an eclipse. The two biggest studies on animal behavior during an eclipse were done in the 1930s and in 2017.
But this year presented an excellent opportunity for animal researchers.
This time, six zoos were in the path of totality and several others experienced partial darkness. So this eclipse was a great time for animal researchers to observe animal behavior.
But let’s take a step back. Why would animals behave differently? Like us, animals have biological clocks that tell them how to behave at different times. But unlike us, they wouldn’t know why total darkness would fall midday. So their biological clocks would tell them it’s daytime, but their eyes would tell them it’s night. How would they react?
The short answer is that some animals exhibited anxiety, some ignored the eclipse completely, and some started their nighttime rituals early.
At the San Antonio Zoo, meercats and wild birds started their nighttime rituals. In Dallas, zookeepers said they saw elephants huddle together and move back to the area where they slept. Primates, like gorillas, also started to behave like it was time for bed. Birds made a lot more noise, disoriented by the darkness.
In Cleveland, the flamingos got agitated as darkness fell and started to flock together. Red wolves ran around confused. At the Akron Zoo, Galapagos tortoises went into their shells. But the Grizzly bears didn’t seem to mind—and the lions just went back to sleep.
In Indianapolis, the sea lions and other creatures started making noise as the eclipse started, but then they quieted down during the four minutes of total darkness. Warthogs, cheetahs, and macaws all began their nighttime rituals.
The director of the Culiacán zoo in Mexico pointed out that the eclipse is too short for many animals to fully enter sleep mode, but some animals started their nighttime rituals nonetheless.
In Quebec, two red pandas spent the afternoon walking around. But when the eclipse came, they climbed a tree and went to sleep together. The zookeepers there noted that prey species tended to react more strongly than predator species did.
At the Ft. Worth, Texas, zoo, nocturnal animals like owls showed an increase in activity—they thought it was time to wake up. The Ft. Worth zoo notes that no animals there appeared to be distressed by the eclipse.
Zoos took advantage of the eclipse to study and note animal behavior. At the Columbus, Ohio, zoo, observers from the zoo and from a nearby university carefully watched the animals and noted what they were doing every fifteen seconds during the eclipse. They had also gone to document animals’ behavior every afternoon for weeks ahead of time to establish a baseline of normal afternoon activity.
But there is a limit to how much we can really know from these limited studies. A total eclipse is only four minutes, and zoos aren’t often in the path of totality. That means there isn’t a large sample size of behavioral studies. And even when researchers can study animals at a zoo, there aren’t many animals to observe each time.
Animals have a mind of their own; they won’t all react the same way. In 2017, for example, giraffes at a South Carolina zoo started to gallop when darkness fell—something they don’t do unless they’re being chased. But in 2024, the giraffes at the Ft. Worth Zoo were calm.
Jeff’s take
There’s a total solar eclipse somewhere on Earth every eighteen months. Unfortunately, though, a lot of them happen over the ocean or in very remote parts of the world. The next one, in August 2026, will cut diagonally across Spain. The only other landmass that will experience total darkness will be Greenland. The eclipse after that, in 2027, will trace the northern coast of Africa. Australia will see one in 2028 and another one in 2030.
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