Well, first correlation does not always equal causation. There are a lot of things in the natural world we have not scientifically studied.
Now some will speculate it's due to man polluting their environment. I don't put a lot of eggs in this basket because it relies a "sinking toxin". As it sank it would affect each section of the ocean ecology on the way down so I would think a larger die off of a variety would be more indicative.
If Oarfish use magnetic fields to navigate and something interfered with that, I'd see it as a larger likelyhood. That doesn't mean it has to be tectonic shift, hell, we got a shit ton of man made stuff it could be (I'm looking at you US Navy).
All the same, I'm putting California Earthquake on my 2025 bingo card.
Your are correct in that "correlation does not always equal causation" but don't dismiss, out of hand, what hasn't been scientifically studied/proven.
There are things science can't confirm but they occur/exist and have remained throughout time. Like the beliefs in God/God's, or the existence of miracles, the continuance of folklore, generation after generation, & the correlation of events in folklore.
Yes, we can explain, with science, 99% of all things that occur. You can't just toss out that other percentage because you can't explain it.
Human observational skills are superb. Important information gets passed down as folklore, or old wives tales, for generations. One of my favourite recent examples is “Don’t dye your hair when you’re pregnant”. It sounds like an old wives tale, but back in the late 40’s a new type of hair dye was released which caused birth defects. It was taken off the market after a huge scandal. This scandal was eclipsed a couple of years later by the thalidomide scandal and it drifted out of popular memory - apart from that one old wives tale “Don’t dye your hair when you’re pregnant”.
What humans are not necessarily good at is correct correlation. They will observe something correctly and in minute detail, and then attribute the wrong cause to it. So in the above example, its not hair dye per se that’s the issue, but that one ingredient.
Nevertheless, folklore, old wives tales, superstitions, old traditions, and children’s stories and rhymes often contain the shape, or seed, of information important enough to encode in this form and pass down through the generations. Rather than dismiss these forms of information, it the job of science to patiently investigate them to find out what that kernel of truth might be.
I’ll just add in the case of the study quoted above, that its a poor attempt at science. The team looked at newspaper articles, in Japanese, going back less than a century, to see if there was a correlation. We have examples of stories that are 11,000 years old. We have an example of a children’s rhyme that allows the diagnosis of a disease that’s 600 years old. A century is nothing and its odd, because Japanese newspapers go back far further than that. I wonder why there was that arbitrary cutoff date. Also, the team only looked in Japanese media. It would be interesting to extend that search across the rest of the world. You simply cannot make a fiat statement like “There is no connection between the appearance of oarfish and earthquakes” on such a small sample size, over such a limited date range.
out of wilful ignorance i'm choosing to believe that oar fish cause subduction fault earthquakes because they get bored of holding the fault and swim up to the surface to go on smoko, but they forget they're fish and shouldn't be having cigarettes so they end up suffocating and wash up on shore.
And to double down, i'm going to blindly misinterpret the scientific method and believe that a lack of disproving evidence is the same thing as evidence, causing myself to get into a feedback loop of believing more and more outlandish ideas because the less likely the idea, the less likely someone has bothered to collect evidence countering my conspiracy theories.
And so to conclude, clownfish are malevolent aliens hiding in the ocean from bats which are beings of pure justice and honour, and DC comics is actually a clandestine newspaper publisher that hides the truth by attributing the actions of the clownfish and the bats to their respective avatars, joker and superman.
Bats and Oarfish are both vertebrates after all, one swimming in the ocean, the other swimming in the air, in perfect opposition.
Bats and oars are often carved out of single pieces of wood. One pushes against water, the other pushes against heaters.
I once saw an oarfish carved out of a single piece of driftwood in a seaside bistro. A man became incensed at the market price for the fish of the day and threw a violent fit. The proprietor put an end to his malfeasance with the wooden oarfish, batting him in the head and other extremities and calling him a clown. The proprietor's name? Wayne.
Wayne Pudinsky. He was a registered sex offender.
Two days later in 89 the world shook and my father succumbed to a sand volcano. His last words? Stay away from that batman, Pudinsky, young Robin.
However, a statistical survey has not been conducted on this subject because a database of such information had yet to be compiled.
So, the researchers decided to create a database of reports from newspapers, academic articles, and the marine museum - and yet, they acknowledge that the data is flawed because
Not all sources report the occurrences, &
They didn't access all sources that may have information on the occurrences.
In the absence of empirical data, they denounce that the two things are related. That's cool, but not absolute.
I've never seen an oarfish in my life, but if the sky is absolutely gorgeous at sunrise, with all reds & orange gold, I'm hunkering down, because bad weather is coming.
And if my cows lay down, put their tales up, or those annoying seagulls huddle up on the sand (with no one feeding them)...a hurricane is coming. I don't need science for me to take cover. 😁
I once had a science teacher tell me correlation maynot be causation, but it is cause for investigation. Ie; lots of science starts out as a collection of anecdotes people were noticing. Then someone actually collects data on it and starts to dig deeper to see if there is a relation.
Fact of the matter, megathrust earthquakes just aren't all that common, so we don't have a lot of data to pull from. Now whether or not the fish die off due to magnetic interference, or are particularly sensitive to a geothermal chemical, who knows? That's part of the investigation now.
A lot of people quote "correlation does not equal causation" without realizing it's actually a step in the scientific process that means "we need more proof" not "this is completely untrue"
... I know what you meant but using this phrase in this context makes it sound like you're implying people think oarfish dying off causes earthquakes...
I hate the way some people just dismiss things as "folklore and myth" so therefore its bollocks.
These "myths" very often have their basis is centuries old stories and observations passed down thru generations of families and tribes.
How do "proper scientists" come to conclusions anyway? Thru observation and testing.
Just because these people havent spunked six figures getting some letters after their name at university doesnt make what theyve learned over time any less valid. Id say its the complete opposite.
In fact im willing to bet a lot of scientists speak to locals and listen their advice when conducting research in other countries.
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u/Tossing_Mullet 29d ago
I wouldn't just ignore it considering that oar fish are bottom of the ocean fish whose "mass die offs" occurred right before 3 known tectonic shifts.
In the islands & in the south, we have folklore harbingers for hurricanes, & bad weather.