It’s a frustration all of us have encountered at some point: Try as we might to ready ourselves to leave the house prepared for the day and what it may bring, we miss the weather forecast — or, worse, we catch it but the weatherman totally blew it — and we’re caught outside in a downpour.
We end up soaking wet. And maybe even brushing tadpoles of our shoulder and picking them out of our hair.
While animals raining from the sky is an uncommon meteorological phenomenon, such events have been observed throughout history though they remain poorly understood. Earlier this month a series of occurrences in parts of Japan have sent residents scrambling to avoid raindrops and tadpoles.
A report in The Telegraph describes one man’s observation:
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.
And while the non-water portion of the precipitation was mostly confined to baby frogs, the Guardian reports that some other critters went along for the unexplained but decidedly wild ride as well: One resident found about a dozen carp hatchlings on his vehicle.
While nature’s mechanism for sucking live, aquatic creatures into the lower atmosphere only to return them via rainfall has not been directly observed, meteorologists suspect waterspouts. These tornadic events that occur specifically over surface water are known to exhibit strong winds and low pressure sufficient to entrain material caught in their path.