On the internet it is already a spreading legend: did the mass stranding and deaths of whales and dolphins on an Australian beach signal the advent of the earthquake that caused the Boxing Day tsunami?

And did an Indian professor, as a result of the first event, warn of the second?

You might think it's a pretty wacky idea. But it's got currency. Yet is it true? What is true is that on December 4, three weeks before the earthquake off Indonesia, an Indian academic, Dr Arunachalam Kumar, professor of anatomy at Kasturba Medical College at Mangalore in Karnataka, posted a note about a recent whale-stranding in Tasmania, and its possible implications, on a "listserve", an e-mail distributor, hosted by Princeton University.

About 120 whales stranded and died in Australia at the end of November and 50 pilot whales died on a Coromandel beach at the same time.

Kumar is a well-known figure in India. An amateur naturalist of some repute and a prolific author, he is a larger-than-life character, frequently in the press.

"It is my observation, confirmed over the years, that mass suicides of whales and dolphins that occur sporadically all over the world, are in some way related to change and disturbances in the electromagnetic field co-ordinates and possible realignments of geotectonic plates thereof," he wrote.

"Tracking the data and plotting the locales of tremors and earthquakes, I am reasonably certain that major earthquakes usually follow within a week or two of mass breaching of cetacians [sic]. I have noted with alarm, the last week report of such mass deaths of marine mammals in an Australian beachside. I will not be surprised if within a few days a massive quake hits some part of the globe. The interrelationship between the unusual 'death-wish' of pods of whales and its inevitable aftermath, the earthquake, may need a further impassioned and unbiased looking into."

There's no doubt that he posted his note on December 4. To read it in the listserve itself, go to new-lists.princeton.edu/listserv/nathistory-india.html and click on "December 2004". In reading it, many are likely to experience a rising of the hair on the back of the neck.

But the story hasn't remained there. It has been widely reported across India and the net. And, in the telling, the story has grown. On January 10, it surfaced on the discussion board of the electronic version of the British Medical Journal. There, a letter from one Jairaj Kumar Chinthamani, a research fellow in Mangalore, said the professor had predicted the earthquake "almost to the day". He actually said "within a week or two" and "within a few days". The quake took place three weeks later.

According to Chinthamani, the professor "wrote that he had made a five-year record of dates and locales of whale strandings, plotted their locales, and correlated them to occurrences of upheavals on land or undersea, and had observed a remarkable connection between the events. In fact, Kumar never mentioned anything as precise as a five-year record.