The Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 is one of the worst natural disasters in human history. Nearly 300,000 people were killed. Yet as the world took stock of the staggering human death toll, there was a growing realization that almost all of the animals in the area survived. Did they somehow sense the coming disaster in time to flee? Do animals somehow pick up signals that humans are missing? This film takes viewers around the world to speak with researchers who are trying to answer those very questions.

We journey to a river in Botswana, where a professor is finding that hippos respond to a frequency far below what humans can detect, known as "infrasound." We meet a geologist in Japan, who believes that animals can discern subtle shifts in the earth's electromagnetic field, giving them advance warning of coming quakes. In Namibia, a researcher is finding that elephants use multiple parts of their bodies to hear, including their feet and trunks, in addition to their famous ears, allowing them to sense rumbles in the earth from miles away. Could this be why a striking number of elephants were reported to have fled countries on all sides of the Indian Ocean in the minutes and even hours before the tsunami's deadly waves arrived? The more scientists explore these questions, the more it is clear that animals are privy to a range of signals that are beyond the limits of our sensory perception. The question that remains to be answered is whether we can harness these skills to save human lives before disaster strikes.