Sometimes Fishes, sometimes frogs, sometimes tadpoles have been reported as falling from the sky - like rain. Starting from Pliny the Elder in the 1st century in Rome many have reported this phenomenon. The French 'scientist' Ampere who did great research on electricity also investigated the phenomenon. In 1861 there was reportedly a huge rain of fish in Singapore!
The modern understanding has been - for the last 80 years or so - that when a fast moving hurricane passes over a water body it forms a water spout which extends as far high as the clouds, and that this water spout sucks up the water and along with that some of the small aquatic animals. And when the twister loses its force the fish are deposited where ever that spot is where it weakened.
Actually no one has so far seen fish fall down - and this fact is crucial. All people who have reported this have seen the fish on the ground or on the surface. This was also the case of Nandigama of Krishna District, by the river Krishna.
Last night huge quantities of fish were found in paddy fields with knee deep water and in some cases on the roads in Nandigama. As they were not there in the evening and they appeared in the morning in their fields, and since fish cannot come out of their water bodies themselves, many thought that it rained fish. While some believe in the tornado/hurricane theory, others believe that strong winds and hurricanes carry the frogs and fish up into the clouds and at some point they drop from there.
Last night huge quantities of fish were found in paddy fields with knee deep water and in some cases on the roads in Nandigama. As they were not there in the evening and they appeared in the morning in their fields, and since fish cannot come out of their water bodies themselves, many thought that it rained fish. While some believe in the tornado/hurricane theory, others believe that strong winds and hurricanes carry the frogs and fish up into the clouds and at some point they drop from there.
Actually, all these explanations and assumptions are most likely to be wrong. It is not difficult to find out why this explanation is wrong.
The easiest is that no cloud is able to carry the weight of 200 gm frog or a 3 kilo fish - clouds are simply water vapour. Secondly hurricanes are not gentle things - they are violent and destroy - it would be rare for a hurricane to gently pick up aquatic creatures and gently deposit them elsewhere - do note that these fish and frogs are alive when found. This is also why the cloud theory can be dismissed right away. The lowest clouds are somewhere around 2 kilometres above our heads. No frog or fish dropped from there is likely to be left in one piece - or without their insides splattered everywhere. Remember that the fish spotted are alive. Finally the columns seen when a 'water spout' is formed is really a rotating column of air with water vapour and mist.
So what could be the most plausible explanation?
Much depends on the species of fish. We know that some fish can jump / fly as much as 50 meters in one go. We also know that some fish do 'travel;' on land. They can for brief periods breathe air, and using their tail and fins can push themselves forward. Some of the fish, like the cat fish, do travel like that. For the non specialist it looks like the fish is struggling because it is out of water, where as in reality it is inelegantly trying to move forward without legs.
Why would fish want to travel? That is not a strange phenomenon to the animal kingdom. As explained in THE BIG QUESTION WITH BABU GOGINENI (DO ANIMALS HAVE CALENDARS? youtube.com/watch?v=W_EHF3qfe4w) (pls add www before youtube) we see crores of red crabs migrating annually on the Christmas Islands near Australia - to lay eggs. In Kenya we have the extraordinary spectacle of the crores of wildebeest rushing on for their migration. Fish travel thousands of kilometers in the sea to mate or to lay eggs. Salmon swim against the water current to go and lay eggs. Turtles and their arrival on India's East Coast is well known and much studied,
This is what must have happened with the fish found in Nandigama and none of these explanations involve the sky as the source of the fish!
-The first rains made fish look for ways to move out of their habitat. They probably were in nearby ponds or in the river. They may have been washed out with the flood waters from these natural water bodies.
- The fish tried to migrate on land and are the ones akin to cat fish.
- Some poor fish farmer's tank may have breached releasing the well fed almost uniformly 3 kilo weighted fish into the paddy fields.
The reason there are also many frogs on the ground after the rains is that frogs are amphibeans, they too swarm, and need water to keep their skins moist. Further, frogs and earth worms and other creatures which have been living in the dry land are forced out of their habitation because they are flooded.
So nothing came from the sky, except the rain water!
