The Story
It’s pouring cats and dogs” may be an idiom used to describe heavy rain, but last week at a seaside city in northeast China, it was so heavy that animals began to fall from the sky. The organisms in this instance were from the sea.
The sea and its creatures are not new to the Chinese city of Qingdao. Even octopuses, shrimp, and crabs are often seen around the coastal city. But it is extremely rare to see them falling from the sky.
As a sea storm moved through the city, people were surprised to see animals fall out of the sky with the rain. The shocking pictures, which have since gone popular on Chinese social media, show sea creatures falling from the sky.
In one picture, an octopus is falling through the air with its limbs flowing behind it. A starfish is spread out on the window of a car in another. A few shrimp were found stuck to window wipers, and someone saw a mussel stuck to their side mirror.
As people shared more and more strange pictures online, the word “seafood rain” started to show up.
A Tornado
Even though the pictures look strange or even like they could have been edited, “seafood rain” is not that rare. Most of the time, a tornado will hover over water, making what is called a “waterspout.” If the wind is strong enough, sea creatures can be picked up and thrown through the air. As the storm moves, the sea life moves with it and can end up yards or even miles from the shore when it falls back to Earth.
The sea storm that caused the octopus rain had hurricane-force winds that measured 12 on the Beaufort scale. This was a record for a hurricane. Aside from the actual fish out of the water, there was a lot of damage to property in the city.
Even though this may be the first or one of the very few times that octopuses and starfish have fallen from the sky during a storm, fish have definitely fallen from the sky during storms in the past. In September, during a rainstorm in Mexico, a few fish fell from the sky. Historians at the Library of Congress say that sea life rain has been described as far back as ancient times.
No one has seen frogs or fish disappearing into the air before a downpour.”But strong winds, like those in a tornado or hurricane, can lift animals, people, trees, and houses,” the library’s website says. “They could ‘rain’ a school of fish or frogs.”
Aside from the sea animals, the community saw chicken egg-sized hail and paper money fall from the sky.
