Rain of animals

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Template:Use dmy dates Template:Short description Template:Expand French Animal rain is a rare meteorological phenomenon in which flightless animals fall from the sky. Such occurrences have been reported in many countries throughout history, an example being the lluvia de peces, a phenomenon that has occurred many times in Honduras.<ref name="Library of Congress">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> One hypothesis is that tornadic waterspouts sometimes pick up creatures such as fish or frogs and carry them for up to several miles.<ref name="Library of Congress" /><ref>Template:Cite news</ref> However, this aspect of the phenomenon has never been witnessed by scientists.<ref name="Ampère">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

History

Rain of flightless animals and things has been reported throughout history.<ref name="Library of Congress" /> In the Bible, a rain of frogs is described as one of the ten plagues of Egypt. The Bible also mentions other similar events, such as quail falling from the sky to save the Hebrews from hunger in Exodus 16:13. In the fourth century BC, the Greek Athenaeus mentioned a rain of fish that lasted three days in the region of Chaeronea in the Peloponnese.<ref name=":1">Template:Cite book</ref> In the Middle Ages, the frequency of the phenomenon in certain regions led locals to imagine that fish were born in the skies before falling into the sea.<ref name=":1" />

File:Wea02218 - Flickr - NOAA Photo Library.jpg
Raining snakes, 1680

In 1625, a rain of frogs was reported to have hit Tournai, Belgium.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In 1794, French soldiers saw toads fall from the sky during heavy rain at Lalain, near the French city of Lille.<ref name="Popular Mechanics">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

|CitationClass=web }}</ref> Rural inhabitants in Yoro, Honduras claim "fish rain" happens there every summer, a phenomenon they call the lluvia de peces, although the name may be indoctrination from a Spanish missionary as the fish have only been found near tributaries after storms.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Explanations

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Tornadoes and waterspouts may lift up animals into the air and deposit them miles away.

French physicist André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) was among the first scientists to take accounts of raining animals. Addressing the Society of Natural Science, Ampère suggested that at times frogs and toads roam the countryside in large numbers, and that violent winds could pick them up and carry them great distances.<ref name="Ampère"/>

After a reported rain of fish in Singapore in 1861, French naturalist Francis de Laporte de Castelnau speculated that a migration of walking catfish had taken place, dragging themselves over land from one puddle to another, following the rain.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

The likeliest explanation for many of the supposed cases is that there is no falling happening at all and the animals are driven along by winds or a deluge of some sort.<ref name="Nobel 2014">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> This explanation accounts for the prevalence of reports that just a single species or type of animal raining from the sky. In several occurrences within two weeks of October, 1987, people in three towns of Gloucestershire, England named Stroud, Cirencester, and Cheltenham reported heavy rain fall that also brought down dozens of tiny pink frogs. Some suggested strong winds, waterspouts, or tornados carried the frogs' eggs flying north across Africa, until falling on England.<ref name="stroud">Template:Cite news</ref>

A current scientific hypothesis involves tornadic waterspouts: a tornado that forms over the water.<ref name="Library of Congress"/><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="Ampère" /> Under this hypothesis, a tornadic waterspout transports animals to relatively high altitudes, carrying them over large distances. This hypothesis appears supported by the type of animals in these rains: small and light, usually aquatic,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and by the suggestion that the rain of animals is often preceded by a storm. However, the theory does not account for how all the animals involved in each individual incident would be from only one species, and not a group of similarly sized animals from a single area.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Further, the theory also does not account for a genuine tornadic waterspout not actually sucking objects up and carrying them rather than flinging objects out to the sides.<ref name = Dunning>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

File:Bat-supercell encounter NWS.png
Doppler Image from Texas showing the collision of a thunderstorm with a group of bats in flight. The color red indicates the animals flying into the storm.

In the case of birds, storms may overcome a flock in flight, especially in times of migration. The Doppler image to the right shows an example wherein a group of bats is overtaken by a thunderstorm.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In the image, the bats are in the red zone, which corresponds to winds moving away from the radar station, and enter into a mesocyclone associated with a tornado (in green). These events may occur easily with birds, which can get killed in flight, or stunned and then fall (unlike flightless creatures, which first have to be lifted into the air by an outside force). Sometimes this happens in large groups, for instance, the blackbirds falling from the sky in Beebe, Arkansas, United States, on December 31, 2010.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> It is common for birds to become disoriented (for example, because of bad weather or fireworks) and collide with objects such as trees or buildings, killing them or stunning them into falling to their death. The number of blackbirds killed in Beebe is not spectacular considering the size of their congregations, which can be in the millions.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> The event in Beebe, however, captured the imagination and led to more reports in the media of birds falling from the sky across the globe, such as in Sweden and Italy,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> though many scientists claim such mass deaths are common occurrences but usually go unnoticed.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> In contrast, it is harder to find a plausible explanation for rains of terrestrial animals.

Some cases are thought to be caused by birds dropping fish. With regard to a documented rain of fish that occurred on December 29, 2021 in Texarkana, Texas. Several residents of a landlocked city, in east Texas have reported a rare sight seeing fish all over the ground after they apparently fell from the sky during a rainstorm. Independent researchers, Sharon A. Hill and Paul Cropper, proposed that the fish had been dropped or possibly regurgitated by passing birds.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The theory found some favor with airport workers who had cleaned up the fish; they noted that there were birds in the area around the same time, and the fish "were kind of chewed up". In June 2022 around the San Francisco coast, a boom of anchovies is likely to be the cause of fair weather falling of fish from birds' mouths, such as pelicans.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Occurrences

The following list is a selection of examples.

Fish

File:Gravure de pluie de poissons.jpg
1555 engraving of rain of fish
  • Singapore, February 22, 1861<ref name="Singapore fish rain">
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 "Rained Fish", AP report in the Lowell (Mass.) Sun, May 16, 1900, p4

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  • Kerala State, India, 12 February 2008<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Bhanwad, Jamnagar, India, 24 October 2009<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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  • Texarkana, Texas, 30 December 2021.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation

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Spiders

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Frogs and toads

Others

See also

References

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Further reading

  • Bajkov, A.D. Do fish fall from the sky? Science, v. 109, April 22, 1949: 402.
  • Bourchier, Daniel. "It's raining fish...no really." Sunday Territorian, Australia, February 28, 2010.
  • Branley, Franklyn M. It's raining cats and dogs: all kinds of weather and why we have it. Illustrated by True Kelley. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 112 p. (Juvenile)
  • Cerveny, Randall S. Freaks of the storm: from flying cows to stealing thunder, the world's strangest true weather stories. New York, Thunder's Mouth Press, c2006. 371 p.
  • Chandler, Barb. Froggy weather. Weather-wise, v. 57, Jan./Feb. 2004: 42.
  • Christian, Spencer and Antonia Felix. Can it really rain frogs?: the world's strangest weather events. New York, Wiley, 1997. 121 p. (Juvenile).
  • Corliss, William. Tornados, dark days, anomalous precipitation, and related weather phenomena: a catalog of geophysical anomalies. Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, c1983. 196 p.
  • Dennis, Jerry. It's raining frogs and fishes: four seasons of natural phenomena and oddities of the sky. New York, HarperCollins, c1992. 323 p.
  • Englebert, Phillis. The complete weather resource. Detroit, UXL, c1997–2000. 4 v.
  • "Frogs fall from the sky." Herald Sun, Melbourne, Australia, June 8, 2005. p. 2.
  • Gray, J. E. The shower of fishes. Zoologist; a monthly journal of natural history, v. 17, 1859: 6540–6541
  • Gudger, E. W. Do fish fall from the sky with rain? Scientific Monthly, v. 29, December 1929: 523–527.
  • McAtee, Waldo L. Showers of organic matter. Monthly Weather Review, v. 45, May 1917: 217–224.
  • Posey, Carl A. The living earth book of wind and weather. Pleasantville, NY, Reader's Digest Association, c1994. 224 p.
  • Waterspouts. In McGraw-Hill concise encyclopedia of science and technology. 5th edition. New York, McGraw-Hill, c2005. pp. 2369–2370.

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