Explain the reason behind the animals falling during rain? Please give clear explain.
Explain the reason behind the animals falling during rain? Please give clear explain.
I should probably start by eliminating a good percentage of them by saying some of many stories are almost certainly embellished. Sometimes, animals will cluster and even die en masse in a seemingly unusual location - for a particularly dramatic example, remember all those red birds fallimg from the sky a year ago? - and it wasn't rain that brought them there. Still, even once you throw out those misreported incidents, and you dismiss most accounts before, say, fifty years ago because of inadequate documentation, there's still plenty of legitimate incidents left over. The possible explanations for these range from the absurd - evidence of the apocalypse or other supernatural happenings - to the sublime, such as when forest officials in india spectaculated that raining fish were the result of pelicans dropping their food during their migration.
In a cool bit of historical trivia, the first scientist to really seriously attempt to figure out what was going with these stories of raining animals was the French physicist André-Marie Ampère, whose last name might well tip you off that he made his name in a different field altogether. Still, when Ampère wasn't discovering electromagnetism and lending his name to the unit of electric current, he offered the first known coherent hypothesis for why frogs could suddenly fall from the sky. As he suggested at a meeting of the Society of Natural Sciences, sudden gusts of violent wind could lift large groups of frogs high into the air, and then when the burst of wind dissipated they would rain back to the ground.
Up the Waterspout
For what was likely little more than a bit of idle speculation, Ampère was more or less correct. The currently favored explanation for animal precipitation involves waterspouts, a special type of tornado that forms over bodies of water. These are capable of sucking up animals in their path and transporting them high up in the air. Because these waterspouts and other types of tornadoes are on the move, when they do eventually break open and release their unwilling passengers, the animals will be far away from their original habitat, hence the appearance of animals raining from nowhere.
That's the probable cause of the majority of these animal rainstorms, and the aquatic nature of these waterspouts helps explain why most of these storms seem to involve either fish or frogs. As for other, even rarer animal storms like those involving worms or spiders, it's easy enough to invoke other types of whirlwinds or just a particularly violent updraft to get the animals high enough to rain back down.
Still, even once you throw out those misreported incidents, and you dismiss most accounts before, say, fifty years ago because of inadequate documentation, there's still plenty of legitimate incidents left over. The possible explanations for these range from the absurd - evidence of the apocalypse or other supernatural happenings - to the sublime, such as when forest officials in india spectaculated that raining fish were the result of pelicans dropping their food during their migration.
In a cool bit of historical trivia, the first scientist to really seriously attempt to figure out what was going with these stories of raining animals was the French physicist André-Marie Ampère, whose last name might well tip you off that he made his name in a different field altogether. Still, when Ampère wasn't discovering electromagnetism and lending his name to the unit of electric current, he offered the first known coherent hypothesis for why frogs could suddenly fall from the sky. As he suggested at a meeting of the Society of Natural Sciences, sudden gusts of violent wind could lift large groups of frogs high into the air, and then when the burst of wind dissipated they would rain back to the ground.
Up the Waterspout
For what was likely little more than a bit of idle speculation, Ampère was more or less correct. The currently favored explanation for animal precipitation involves waterspouts, a special type of tornado that forms over bodies of water. These are capable of sucking up animals in their path and transporting them high up in the air. Because these waterspouts and other types of tornadoes are on the move, when they do eventually break open and release their unwilling passengers, the animals will be far away from their original habitat, hence the appearance of animals raining from nowhere.
That's the probable cause of the majority of these animal rainstorms, and the aquatic nature of these waterspouts helps explain why most of these storms seem to involve either fish or frogs. As for other, even rarer animal storms like those involving worms or spiders, it's easy enough to invoke other types of whirlwinds or just a particularly violent updraft to get the animals high enough to rain back down.
