Episode 140: Rains of Fish and Frogs (and other things)
b"We're starting off October (you know, MONSTER MONTH) with accounts of animals that fall from the sky like rain, mostly fish and frogs! Is this a real thing that actually happens, and if so, what causes it?\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nRaining Frogs\\n\\nRecent observations of \\u201cmystery star jelly\\u201d in Scotland appear to confirm one origin as spawn jelly from frogs or toads\\n\\nNot a real photo of an octopus falling in a storm:\\n\\n\\n\\nThis photo is probably real, two shrimp/prawns on a windshield in the same storm as above (in 2018):\\n\\n\\n\\nA photo of people picking up fish in the street but I have no idea where it was taken:\\n\\n\\n\\nAn arctic lamprey found in someone's yard:\\n\\n\\n\\nSome of the stuff called star jelly, star rot, or star snot:\\n\\n\\n\\nA walking catfish:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nIt\\u2019s finally October, and that means monsters and other spooky stuff! I have lots of fun episodes planned this month, but first, an important announcement!\\n\\nA few weeks ago I got a message from someone on Podbean, and I feel terrible because I can\\u2019t reply or even see the whole message or who it\\u2019s from! Podbean does not like me. I get an email with the first couple of lines of the message but when I click through and log in to Podbean to see the whole message and respond, Podbean goes, \\u201cMessage? What message? You don\\u2019t have any messages.\\u201d So please, person who messaged me with a suggestion I can\\u2019t see, I\\u2019d love it if you email me at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com! And if anyone else has ever messaged me somewhere but never received a reply, email is the best way to get hold of me. I always reply, so if you don\\u2019t get an answer it means I never saw your message and you should totally send it again. Thanks!\\n\\nSo, back to the October fun! Let\\u2019s start off the month right with a strange phenomenon that\\u2019s been reported for untold centuries all over the world. Do fish and frogs and other animals actually sometimes fall from the sky like rain?\\n\\nIt seems pretty certain that while this is a rare event, and not all reports are of animals that actually fell from the sky, it does sometimes happen. In fact, lots of weird stuff falls from the sky from time to time. For instance, after a heavy rain over Punta Gorda, Florida at the end of August 1969, the streets were full of golf balls, dozens of them if not hundreds. But there wasn\\u2019t a golf course near the town.\\n\\nSometimes colored rain falls instead of ordinary clear water. This happens because raindrops form around tiny specks of dust or pollen in the air. When the dust is colored, the rain will be too. Red rains come from dust blown into the atmosphere from the Sahara while yellow rain results from dust from the Gobi Desert. Volcanic eruptions, soot, and other pollutants in the air can cause black rain. And a red rain that fell in Kerala, India in July 2001 was analyzed and the color found to be due to fungal spores. Snow is occasionally colored too, just like rain.\\n\\nBut sometimes frogs, fish, or other small animals do apparently fall from the sky, with or without rain. Here\\u2019s a typical report of a rain of frogs. It comes from the book The Unexplained by zoologist Karl Shuker, whose honesty and scholarship I trust. Not only that, it\\u2019s something that happened to his own grandmother, Gertrude Timmins. In 1902, Gertrude was only eight years old. She and her mother were walking across a field in the West Midlands in England when it started to rain. They opened their umbrellas, but a moment later Gertrude noticed that amid the regular pattering of rain on an umbrella there were some heavier thumps. Then she noticed that the thumps were caused by small frogs falling onto her umbrella and bouncing off onto the ground. Gertrude was frightened at first, naturally, because that\\u2019s just a weird thing to happen to anyone. But her mother told her not to be scared, it was just a rain of frogs.\\n\\nRemember, Gertrude and her mother were walking across a ..."