Fish raining down on you from the sky is rare, but fish raining down on you two nights in a row is just plain eldritch. The unlikely two-night fish rain occurred last week in a small Australian town called Lajamanu in the Northern Territory.
On Thursday around 6 pm hundreds of small white fish started falling from the sky, to the shock and surprise of the local inhabitants who live on the edge of the Tanami Desert, hundreds of kilometers from Lake Argyle and Lake Elliot and even further away from the ocean. To make things even more bewildering, the same thing happened around 6 pm on Friday as well.
Christine Balmer, an aged care co-ordinator working at the Lajamanu Aged Care Centre, said her family interstate thought she had lost the plot when she told them about the event.
“I haven’t lost my marbles,” she said to local media. “Thank god it didn’t rain crocodiles.”
Balmer also managed to snap some photos of the fish littering the ground.
“They fell from the sky everywhere”, she explained. “Locals were picking them up off the footy oval and on the ground everywhere. These fish were alive when they hit the ground.”
Lajamanu has a population of less than 700 people, of which a significant amount are of Aboriginal origin. Its only accessible by air or dirt road and governed by a combination of community government council and local tribal council.
The town is no stranger to fish rains. Back in 2004 Lajamanu experienced a similar downpour and there are also reports of fish falling from the sky in 1974. This is however the first recorded incident of fish raining down on Lajamanu two evenings in a row.
Fish rains are normally caused by tornadoes that sweep up fish, and fish captured in this fashion can travel far distances and still be alive when they land.
According to Ashley Patterson, senior forecaster at the weather bureau, conditions were perfect on Friday for a tornado in the Douglas Daly region. However, no tornadoes has been reported to the authority.
“It’s a very unusual event,” he said. “With an updraft, (fish and water picked up) could get up high – up to 60,000 or 70,000 feet. Or possibly from a tornado over a large water body – but we haven’t had any reports.”
The small white fish has been tentatively identified as spangled perch (Leiopotherapon unicolor ), one of the most widely distributed Australian native freshwater fishes.
A number of Japanese citizens living in the Ishikawa Prefecture have made some strange observations during the last few days.
Nanao, Japan, June 4
During the evening of June 4, a man suddenly heard a plopping sound in a parking lot of the Nakajima citizens centre in Nanao. When he looked back, he was surprised to see tadpoles scattered over a car and on the ground. According to Kiwamu Funakura, 36, an official at the centre who went to the parking lot at the time, about 100 tadpoles, each 2 or 3 centimetres long, were scattered over an area measuring about 200 square meters.
Hakusan, Japan, June 6
Two days later and roughly 70 kilometres southwest of Nanao, a similar event occurred in another parking lot. In the morning of June 6, between 20 and 30 dead tadpoles were found on a car windshield and other places in a Hakusan parking lot, with some reportedly having lost their original shape.
Nanao, Japan, June 8
Back in Nano, Takeshi Kakiuchi, 62, a member of the Nanao Municipal Assembly, found six tadpoles on his car and on the ground around his home Monday morning. Kakiuchi’s home is located roughly 4 km from the Nakajima citizens centre.
Nakanotomachi, Japan, June 9
On Tuesday evening, Yukio Oumi, 78, found 13 fish on the back of his truck and on the ground around his home in Nakanotomachi. The fish are believed to be crucian carps, each measuring about 3 centimetres.
Fish and frogs falling from the sky?
The reason behind the strange events has not yet been determined, and the Kanazawa Local Meteorological Observatory says it has no information that any tornadoes occurred on the days when the animals appeared.
Susumu Aiba, professor at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, says that small-scale wind gusts may have swept over limited areas, swirling up water and any creatures living in it. If the gusts were small enough, they may have been able to avoid meteorological detection.
Another suggestion comes from Kimimasa Tokikuni, the head of the Ishikawa prefectural branch of the Japanese Society for Preservation of Birds. “Birds such as herons or umineko that had these tadpoles in their mouths or gorges might have dropped them because they were startled by something while flying,” he says. All the places where animals seem to have fallen from the sky during the last few days are located in close vicinity to flooded rice paddies, so birds may have caught tadpoles and small fish there in an attempt to feed their young. Herons and other water fowl are in the middle of their breeding period right now.