Solar eclipse 2025: How animals react to sudden darkness during solar eclipse

While spiders begin to break down their webs, something they do at the end of the day. Once the eclipse moves on, they begin to rebuild them again. Hippos in Zimbabwe were seen leaving the rivers and heading towards their nocturnal feeding grounds, only to abort the mission once the eclipse disappeared midway. According to a 2020 paper published in the journal Animals, cowering and other expressions of anxiety were also seen in baboons, gorillas, giraffes, flamingos, parrots and lorikeets. Another research reported in the American Journal of Primatology shared how chimpanzees in the Yerkes Primate Research Center climbed the highest point of a climbing structure and looked at the sky, until it brightened again, during an annular eclipse on May 30, 1984.