It seems that ants can survive large wildfires. But how about volcanoes? These natural disasters create so much heat and dust that practically all life will be toasted. Or not?

The theory is controversial, but the German geologist Ulrich Schreiber from the University of Duisburg thinks wood ants can predict volcanic eruptions. He describes in his novel how wood ants predict a devastating volcanic eruption in the German Eifel volcanic field. The ants should identify the carbon dioxide before the eruption and leave their nests. However, the novel was fiction and other scientists did not take it seriously.

When ants can predict an eruption, they can flee. But millions of ants, walking to a saver place, tens of kilometers away? What would happen is an Eifel volcano would erupt? Let’s hope it happens in the early summer when temperature reaches 25 degrees. With this speed the ants would need at least 100 hours to walk to a saver 10 kilometers distance… without time to sleep and eat. But maybe they do not have to walk that far. The eruption of Mount St. Helens learned that ants did survive pretty close to the volcano. The lived underground. Deep enough to survive the pyroclastic cloud.

But go back to the prediction of an volcanic eruption. Schreiber wrote about wood ants. But four days before the eruption Mount Pelée in the Caribbean in 1902 a large swarm of some kind of speckled ants flee into a sugar work, two miles northwest of St. Pierre. Maybe the ants did indeed sense the changes in carbon dioxide. But maybe there is another way ants can feel or sense a coming disaster. Volcano’s are geological events where the earth crust is pushed up by the magma beneath. This does not just happen. Volcanoes create permanent small earthquakes year after year. Seismologists can predict an eruption by measuring these movements. It seems that ants can also feel the increasing number and strength of earthquakes