10 Astonishing Places Where Helpless Animals Rained From the Sky

"Raining cats and dogs" is a common expression in English to describe heavy rain, but did you ever stop and wonder what would happen if animals really did fall from the sky?

It’s not unthinkable that a large storm might carry some small creatures to a new location. It was, after all, the premise of the infamous Sharknado movie franchise, in which a tornado deposits sharks all over a flooded city. Admittedly, heavier animals like sharks, cats and dogs have not actually fallen from the sky, but a surprising number of other ones have. Here are ten strange places where it’s happened.

10. Qingdao, China

In 2018, a violent storm struck the coastal city of Qingdao in China. Hurricane force winds and giant hailstones wreaked havoc on the city. The winds were so powerful, they caused a waterspout to form over the ocean that sucked up small creatures from below. And what happens to poor sea creatures who happen to be swimming where a fast-moving waterspout forms? If you have seen Sharknado, you know the answer.
 

Luckily for the people of Qingdao, it didn’t rain deadly sharks. But they were showered with an assortment of sea creatures, including starfish, shellfish and mollusks. China's weather agency would later confirm that many sea creatures had been blown inland by the waterspout, and residents of the city shared images of the surreal “seafood rain” online.

9. Coalburg, Alabama

The Qingdao incident in 2018 is far from the first time nature has provided people with an unsolicited assortment of seafood. Way back in 1892, the hamlet of Coalburg in Alabama had a similar experience. When rain broke out of a black storm cloud one night, the people living there quickly noticed that something was off about the sound of the raindrops.
 

When they looked outside, they initially believed they were seeing a storm of snakes, but they soon realized that it was actually raining young eels. Contemporary reports from witnesses say that there were millions of them, but these numbers could be overstated. Still, there were enough to create mountains of eels that rendered the village uninhabitable for a short time. It wasn't all bad, though. The farmers used the slippery supply as fertilizer for their crops.

8. Calgary, Canada

In August 1921, the people of Calgary experienced a similarly disturbing downpour. Frogs were falling from the heavens and crashing all over 11 Avenue. While the people struggled to make sense of what they were witnessing, it’s believed that the cats in the neighborhood enjoyed quite a feast. 
 

One theory which could explain the frog rain is that they’d been sucked up by a tornado. It is possible for small ponds to be completely consumed by tornadoes, and presumably any frogs in the water would be taken as well. Surprisingly, amphibious assaults like this one have a long history and were even reported way back in ancient times. Extreme weather events are thought to have been responsible then, too.

7. Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan

For a few days in 2009, Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan kept having downpours not of frogs, but of tiny tadpoles. However, these weren’t sucked up in a tornado like their fully grown cousins in Canada. In fact, Japanese meteorologists noted that strong winds were eerily absent from the area at the time. 
 

One alternative explanation blamed the mess on birds. Crows are known to sometimes eat tadpoles, and some people thought that maybe the birds had spat them out while flying. This explanation seemed to satisfy the weather experts, but a local ornithologist said that the area covered by the tadpoles should have been larger if this was the case. In one of the several slimy incidents that month, around 100 tadpoles fell within a space of just 10 square meters.

6. Old Beach, Tasmania

While the cause of the tadpole rain remains a mystery, there are cases where birds are more likely to have been behind things. One made news in Australia in February 2023. It started when Lauren McArthur of Old Beach, Tasmania, noticed her dogs sniffing around something stuck between the slats of her wooden decking. Upon closer inspection, she realized it was a seahorse. 
 

She posted some photos to a local Facebook group in the hope of solving the mystery of how it got there. After some strange suggestions involving aliens, some actual scientists got in touch to say that it was most likely meant to be a bird's food, but that it had been dropped. They even got into the specifics of which type of bird it could have been, with the frontrunners being a gull or a raven.

5. Oroville, California

Birds may explain how some sea creatures end up being found on land, but weather events still explain most cases. The animals that get picked up and moved by tornadoes and waterspouts have to be light, so small fish are often the unlucky ones. This was the case in a northern California town in 2017, but what’s strange about this example is how specific the drop zone was: a single elementary school campus.
 

On an otherwise normal Tuesday, a storm struck right above Stanford Avenue Elementary School in Oroville, California and hurled small fish all over the school grounds. At first, the staff thought that the school had been the victim of a strange prank. However, reports say that the storm started up again while the school was at recess, and the poor students in the playground were pelted with the wriggly, wet payload.

4. Utah

Small fish are actually able to survive falls from surprisingly great heights, provided that they land in water, of course. The physics of this have been well tested by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. In order to restock the trout population in high elevation rivers and lakes, they drop them into the water from low-flying planes at about 100 feet.
 

They opt for this method of weird, man-made weather because it is much more efficient than other restocking methods, like piping the trout into the water or carrying them on horseback, which is how it was done back in the day. A plane takes only a few hours to drop as many as 35,000 trout into around 40 lakes, and the practice has been taking place since the 1950s.

3. Southern Tablelands, Australia

Some animals are actually able to use the weather to move themselves to new locations. This is what happens during “mass ballooning.” If you don’t know this is, it probably conjures up images of a gracefully ascending army of hot air balloons, like in Cappadocia, Turkey. But that idyllic image couldn’t be further from the nightmare of what it really means. For it’s not people who engage in mass ballooning, but Australian spiders. 
 

They “balloon” by climbing to the highest point in their habitat, spinning strands of silk together in a way that catches the wind, and casting themselves into the air. They do this when they need to find a new home. The “mass” part of the name comes because millions of them do this at the same time. However, as terrifying as this sounds, scientists say that there’s no need to panic. The spiders which do this are very small.

2. Norway

Spiders aren’t the only creepy land-based creatures that the weather can move in large numbers. In 2015, a biologist from Norway came across the aftermath of a mass migration involving a different species. However, this one may not have been intentional. He was out walking when he noticed that thousands of worms were strewn across the snowy ground around him. He said there were as many as 20 worms per square meter, and when he put some in his hand, he realized they were still alive and wriggling.
 

The snow added to the mystery, because it meant the worms couldn’t have emerged from the earth. They would’ve frozen if they had. So, how did they get there? The only alternative seems to be that they fell from the sky, but that theory invites more questions than it answers. Some believe that the worms, after emerging towards the end of winter, were picked up by rising pockets of warm air called thermals. They were then carried some distance before being dropped onto the ground below.

1. Winnipeg, Canada

If the weather is strong enough and its payload is light enough, it’s possible for animals to be carried to entirely different countries. This is what happened one warm day in 1895 in Winnipeg, Canada. In what must have been a truly terrifying sight, a blizzard of biting black ants descended from a heavy storm cloud.
 

The ants were said to be as big as wasps and to have strong nippers, and they were unlike anything the Canadians had seen. They were foreign to the region, so they must have been carried quite a distance to where they were eventually dropped off. Reports said that they looked like African ants, but it is believed that they were picked up in the southern regions of the US.

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