Rains of Fish and Frogs

Summary

Live fish and frogs have fallen out of the sky onto witnesses, in daylight, repeatedly, for centuries. The mechanism is a whirlwind over water. This is accepted, it is almost certainly right, and it has one weakness that most accounts skip: no scientist has ever watched it happen.

What is documented

The falls. These are not folklore. They were reported at the time, in newspapers, in scientific journals, and to naturalists, and in several cases the animals were collected and identified.

• 1794, Lalain, near Lille, France. French soldiers saw toads fall during heavy rain.
• 1859, Aberdare, Wales. A reported fall of small fish, sticklebacks and minnows among them, onto a sawmill worker. Specimens were sent to the British Museum, where J. E. Gray found very young minnows, unlike fish carried by whirlwinds in the tropics, and put the episode down to a practical joke: he thought the man's workmates had thrown a pailful of water with the fish in it over him. The Zoologist, which published his note that year, agreed.
• 1861, Singapore. A reported fall of fish, examined by the French naturalist Francis de Castelnau.
• 1974, 2004, 25-26 February 2010 and 19-20 February 2023, Lajamanu, Northern Territory, Australia. Hundreds of spangled perch fell on the town. Lajamanu sits on the northern edge of the Tanami Desert, about 560 km south-west of Katherine. Many of the fish were alive when they landed. Spangled perch are notably hardy out of water. After the 2023 fall, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory's curator of fishes said that fish found after rain have mostly burst out of local waterholes in the flood, though he could not rule out a fall. The 2010 fall was reported in the Northern Territory News.
• 2005, Odžaci, Serbia. Thousands of frogs fell during a storm.
• 13 January 2012, Loreto, Agusan del Sur, Philippines. Small fish were reported falling with heavy rain.

The animals. Consistently small: fish generally 5 to 20 cm, typically freshwater species, minnows, sticklebacks, perch, sunfish, occasionally young marine fish. They have no adaptation for flight and no capacity to survive prolonged exposure. They are passengers.

The scientific literature. The phenomenon has been taken seriously by meteorologists for over a century. André-Marie Ampère addressed the Society of Natural Science on it in the early 1800s, proposing that violent winds could lift and carry animals a considerable distance. Waldo McAtee reviewed the accounts in the Monthly Weather Review in 1917. E. W. Gudger asked the question directly in the Scientific Monthly in 1929, under the title "Do fishes fall from the sky with rain?"

Leading explanations

Tornadic waterspouts and tornadoes (accepted). A waterspout is a vortex over water. Its visible funnel is condensation, not a column of lifted water, but the whirlwind itself is capable of picking small animals off the surface or out of the shallows and carrying them, sometimes for miles, before releasing them as the vortex weakens. Everything about the falls fits: the animals are small, they are shallow-water species, the falls occur in storms, and the deposits scatter over an area consistent with debris released from height.

The gap in the evidence, stated plainly. This has never been directly observed. No researcher has watched a waterspout ingest a shoal and no researcher has followed one to a deposition. The mechanism is an inference from the falls, from the meteorology, and from the fact that whirlwinds demonstrably lift heavier things than a perch. It is a strong inference. It is not an observation, and the registry says so rather than allowing "accepted" to quietly become "witnessed."

Yoro, Honduras: a special case, and probably not a fall at all. The lluvia de peces of Yoro is the most famous case in the world and the weakest one in this entry. Small fish are found on the ground in Yoro after storms, between May and July, reportedly every year, and the town holds a festival for it. Three things trouble the aerial explanation. The nearest sea is roughly 72 km away, and waterspouts do not reliably collect fish from open ocean and deliver them to the same inland town every summer. The fish are found near tributaries after flooding rather than scattered on rooftops. And a National Geographic team in the 1970s reportedly found the fish to be blind, which is characteristic of animals that live underground. The leading alternative is that the fish come up from a subterranean watercourse or cave system when it floods, rather than down from the clouds. The registry does not treat Yoro as an established rain of fish.

Current status

Later explained. Animals fall from the sky. The reports are real, and the specimens were collected and identified. The transport mechanism is well supported and almost certainly correct, and it has never been caught in the act. The registry keeps this case because it is the rare instance in which the folklore is true, the sceptics were wrong, and the explanation is nevertheless one honest observation short of complete.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.