In a country that is still devastated by a massive earthquake, a new phenomenon has cropped up, or down in this case. It was raining fish in Tampico, Mexico, which has many questioning how this can happen and what could this possibly mean?
According to Pedro Granados, who is the director of civil protection in Tamaulipas state, his agency has received reports along with pictures and videos of this event from area residents. This wasn’t a big event with a lot of fish, but there were enough to take notice of this strange occurrence. Witnesses described fish falling from the sky in a pattern of “one here, one there,” according to NPR News.
The fish were very tiny, but they could be heard slapping on the pavement as they fell, indicating they fell from high above the ground. Granados spoke with the local news media describing the small fish as weighing just a few grams. He added that this event “is strange, not normal.”
Mexico is not alone with their shower of fish, other cases have been documented around the world, including in the United States. There is a small Honduran town that sits inland and they hold a festival each year because they experience a rainshower of fish annually with such regularity. They aren’t concerned that this is a strange event, on the contrary, they call a “gift from God.”
This event of falling fish in Honduras is like a delivery of fresh seafood to a town inland that doesn’t see much of the ocean’s bounty on their plates year round. Many in this town say it is the only time of the year that they get to eat seafood when it rains down from the sky, according to the New York Pos t. According to NPR , its documented in the Library of Congress that it rained fish in both Kansas City and Dubuque, Iowa, in the second half of the 19th century.
Fish fall from sky with rain in northern Mexico https://t.co/3u3yQPqZak
— CBC News (@CBCNews) September 28, 2017
Early this year reports of it raining fish in a Northern California town made the headlines. The town of Oroville experienced it raining fish, little fish, much like what happened this week in Mexico. You can see the picture of the California raining fish event below, which looked similar to the fish falling in Mexico.
WEIRD WEATHER: Fish rains down from clouds on Oroville elementary school https://t.co/cdvHiEQRYY pic.twitter.com/tkXXAVghe0
— Action News Now (@ActionNewsNow) May 18, 2017
As odd as this seems, there’s a simple scientific explanation for this phenomenon. A waterspout, which is a tornado that forms over water, pulls water up into the clouds and along with the water comes the fish. When those clouds are ready to disperse water on an area, the fish come raining down as well. According to AOL Weather , clouds can carry the fish for miles before sending them back to Earth in a rain shower.
NPR’s headline “It Rained Fish In Mexico, Officials Say. No, It’s Not The End Times (We Think). Another headline questioning end of days is seen from Sputnik News. Their headline asks, “Signs of the Apocalypse? Fish Rain Down From the Sky in Mexico.” It is nothing that extravagant as the world coming to an end. It is just a waterspout that sucked the fish into the clouds and emptied them out with the rain.
Back in Mexico where Granados can’t find a clear reason for the fish raining down on the town, he told the media:
“I don’t know if it’s climate change,” he said, “but we’ve had tornadoes, storms, rains, floods, raining fish, eclipses, earthquakes, all kinds of natural phenomena that we aren’t used to, but that we are experiencing these days.” Below is a video of the raining fish event in Mexico that was posted to YouTube.
[Featured Image by DeStefano/Shutterstock]
