system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Can animals truly tell when an earthquake is about to hit? And if so how?
gpt
As far as we know, no. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of animals acting strangely prior to earthquakes. However, this has never been reproducible in a scientific sense - e.g. a certain species of animal reacts in a specific way a specific amount of time before an earthquake. There are lots of extraneous (uncontrolled) variables that could coincidentally cause unusual behaviour - famine, temperature change etc.

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That's not to say animals can't detect earthquakes ahead of humans - we know animals have senses that humans do not. What we can say with certainty is that we don't know of any mechanism that would allow animals to detect earthquakes before we (and our technology) do, nor any reliable animal behaviour that would predict an earthquake. 

A useful comparison is the classic "canary in a coalmine". Canaries are more sensitive to lethal gases than humans thus would die before humans noticed a lethal gas buildup. That was reproducible, even if at the time we didn't understand why canaries die before humans. It is possible that in future a similar relationship will be discovered, but we can't prove any relationship so far.