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New study suggests how toads might predict earthquakes

We've all heard of strange animal behaviour shortly before an earthquake, but it appears toads have an idea of what's going on quite far in advance:

Grant was studying the toads that lived in a pond near L'Aquila, Italy, in 2009 in the days just before a devastating earthquake struck. In those few days just before it happened, she noted that the toads began leaving. Their numbers dwindled from just under a hundred, to zero, causing her to write about her observations in the Journal of Zoology. That caught the attention of Freund, who was doing work for NASA in studying what happens to rocks when put under extreme stress, as in say, when an earthquake is in the making. He contacted Grant, and the two of them began investigating ways that such rock pressure could impact the environment where the toads lived.

After some experiments in the lab, the two write that when rocks underground come under pressure as a result of geological processes, they let off charged particles. Such particles can very quickly rise to and above the surface of the Earth, impacting such things as pond water and the biological material in it. In the case of the pond in Italy, it seems the toads may have been reacting to changes they felt in the water itself as ions interacting with it react to form minute amounts of hydrogen peroxide. Or it seems possible that ions interacting with organic material in the pond caused substances to be released that either were toxic or less ominously, simply irritating. Either way, it would explain their sudden exodus.

Of course, they are excluding the possibility that toads are psychic. Maybe they lick themselves and then can see the future...