It's raining shrimp? Get sauce

Sometimes my human gives me a treat by replacing my usual dry food with a small can of very tasty soft food. One of my most favourite flavours is seafood surprise, which consists of a mixture of cod, crab, shrimp and probably other unidentifiable bottom-feeding sea creatures. When I came across this story from an alternative news website, I couldn't help but feel envious of all the cats living in San Diego, who only have to wander outside for this fresh and tasty feast.

UNION-TRIBUNE
May 10, 2005

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." That's the name of a children's book about the strange town of Chewandswallow where it rains soup and snows mashed potatoes. All the town's food is delivered by the weather.

Up on Mount Soledad, Janet Andrews is reporting it rained shrimp on April 28. She and others found masses of baby shrimp on the tennis courts of the Summit residential development.

"They're not crazy," says Bob Burhans, curator of the Birch Aquarium at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. "I haven't heard of it raining shrimp, but I have heard of it raining fish." About 15 years ago, a Chula Vista man reported that hundreds of minnows had dropped out of the sky onto his driveway, yard and roof. A marine biologist at Scripps identified the airborne fish and theorized they were from the Sweetwater Reservoir.

The most likely delivery system: a wind funnel that formed over the water, picking up surface creatures and then dropping its load as it dissipated.

So it probably went for the shrimp. When the weather gets rough, juvenile shrimp at the ocean surface tend to gather in large numbers in the shallows, Burhans explains.

"There were warnings of potential sea spouts a couple of hours before that storm came in," says Burhans, adding that a sea spout can travel a mile or two, or even farther.

"If I hadn't heard about the minnows," Burhans says, "I might have thought these people were crazy."