Frog falls and fish falls

[Xenocrates]

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1421070.html?menu=news.quirkies

Traffic came to a halt and locals fled inside after thousands of frogs fell from the sky onto a Serbian village.

But climatology expert Slavisa Ignjatovic said there was a simple scientific explanation for the incident.

He said: "A whirlwind has sucked up the frogs from a lake, the sea or some other body of water somewhere else and carried them along to Odzaci where they have fallen to the ground. It is a recognised scientific phenomenon."

The counterargument to Slavista Ignjatovitch is:

One of the most recent examples of fish falling from the sky took place the summer of 2000 in Ethiopia. A local newspaper reported: "The unusual rain of fish, which dropped in millions from the air - some dead and others still struggling - created panic among the mostly religious farmers." This is just one of countless case studies of rains of fish, frogs, periwinkles - even alligators - that have been cataloged over the centuries, many by famed paranormal researcher Charles Fort. (Such rains of creatures have been, in fact, come to be known as "Fortean" activity.)

Most often these rains of animals are attributed to severe storms, tornadoes, water spouts and related phenomena. Although the theory has not yet been proved, it holds that strong winds pick up the fish or frogs from bodies of water such as ponds, streams and lakes, carry them aloft - sometimes for miles and miles - and then drop them over land.

The peculiar fact that challenges this theory is this: in most cases, the rains are of one kind of animal only. It rains one species of herring, for example, or a particular kind of frog. How can this be explained? Could a powerful gust of wind be so discriminating? If the storm scooped up water from a pond, wouldn't it rain all kinds of things one finds in a pond - frogs, toads, fish, weeds, sticks and probably beer cans?

http://paranormal.about.com/od/earthmysteries/a/aa071204_3.htm

It's odd that people report falls of fish or frogs etc but they never (AFAIK) report mixed falls, after all frogs and fish must be in close proximity to each other and to inamimate stuff in the water.

It's one of the oldest inexplicable phenomena. It won't surprise you to know that I find Mr Ignjatovitch's standard explanation to be incomplete. What say you? This is a genuine mystery is it not?

 

[ShannonCT]

It's odd that people report falls of fish or frogs etc but they never (AFAIK) report mixed falls, after all frogs and fish must be in close proximity to each other and to inamimate stuff in the water.

Objects would fall out of a whirlwind at different times depending on their density. More dense objects would fall first.

 

[Xenocrates]

Objects would fall out of a whirlwind at different times depending on their density. More dense objects would fall first.

True and beer cans would most likely be full of water and so not get sucked up so much.

But we'd get a fish fall and a related fall of other stuff a few yards/miles downwind.

Actually I found one case where there was a fall of algae with the fish:

http://www.geocities.com/INEXPLICATA2000/issue3/6.htm

A resident of the Moncelos parish (province of Lugo), had the surprise of his life when he discovered that one of his properties was inundated with small fish and algae after a massive storm that had affected the area.

"Upon seeing the fish, my first thought was that someone had thrown their garbage onto his farm, since it's located by the roadside," Jaime explained. "But it later dawned on me that the there were algae like the kind you see in fish tanks right next to the fish..."

A few days after the curious event, some of the small fish and algae fallen from the skies remained visible over a two hundred square meter surface, even thought the vast majority of them had already fallen prey to birds and cats. Our initial impression, when Jaime's mother described the events, was that some fisherman without a permit had been caught in the act by the Guardia Civil and had scattered the proof of the crime within the farm. But this hypothesis would collapse upon examining some of the fishes and ascertaining that they were jureles, a type of maritime fish quite common in the Galician estuaries. We were further able to learn that particular type of algae is not found in riverine environments and that the only fish to be found there were lowly trout.

In other words the species of fish and the species of algae aren't found in the same place (except in fishtanks) and yet fell simultaneously - despite having different densities. To make the simple whirlwind theory work, we'd need two whirlwinds travelling to the same place with the second somehow catching up with the first. OK, so the fall followed a storm which indicates that a weather-related hypothesis is reasonable (rather than teleportation ).

 

[Irish Caesar]

Let my people go.

Certainly a strange phenomenon, and one I'd be a bit confused at if I were to be caught in the middle of a thunder and frog storm.

 

[Perfection]

Maybe the algae stuck to the fish.