It’s raining tadpoles in coastal region of Japan!
By ANIWednesday, June 10, 2009
LONDON - In a bizarre incident, a coastal region of Japan reportedly had tadpoles raining on them from the sky.
The incident, in central Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture, has left residents, officials and scientists baffled, as clouds of dead tadpoles have been falling from the sky in a series of episodes in a number of cities in the region since the start of the month.
In one incident, a 55-year-old man who was caught in a tadpole downpour described hearing a strange sound in the parking lot of a civic centre in the city of Nanao.
Upon further exploration, he found more than 100 dead tadpoles covering the windshields of cars in an area measuring 10 square metres.
Local officials also reported the downpour of dead tadpoles 48 hours later in the city of Hakusan in the same prefecture, and the raining down of small creatures such as frogs and fish is a rare meteorological phenomenon that is reported from time to time across the world.
Scientists have widely attributed the surreal raining of animals to strong winds, storms and water sprouts sucking up creatures before depositing them further inland.
However, this explanation has not satisfied meteorologists in the Ishikawa region.
Officials at Kanazawa Local Meteorological Observatory told local media that they were unsure how the tadpoles had arrived, as there had been no reports of strong winds at the time.
Another scientific explanation for raining animals relates to birds carrying the small creatures before dropping them as they fly overland.
However, the theory was dismissed by a researcher at the Yamashina Institute for Ornithology in Abiko.
“Crows eat tadpoles but if these were spat out (by the birds), a wider area should have been covered,” the Telegraph quoted the researcher as telling Kyodo news. (ANI)