Dead roach society

Fishing Lines

The piranhas put us off swimming in Ecuador. Stuck in the middle of the rainforest, with temperatures in the 80s and humidity so thick you could almost bite it, jumping into the water was a natural thing to do. But we knew what was waiting under the murky surface. We had caught piranhas more than 18in long, their jaws so powerful that one bit through a forged hook.

So when our guide jumped in and said the water was lovely, we showed a distinct lack of enthusiasm about joining him. "What about the piranhas?" we asked. "Oh, they won't attack," he said airily. "They might not attack you, but there's much more meat on us," we pointed out. And so we never went for a dip (and consequently smelt like it too).

Being attacked by live fish must be a nasty experienced. Piranhas, sharks, conger eels, barracuda and even pike all have bad reputations for biting the biter. How much worse it must be to be assaulted by dead fish.

No, this is serious. Only last week Ruth Harnett, of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, was bombed by a shoal of dead fish while putting her weekly shopping in the car. Her coat and glasses were splattered by the flying fish, which were roach between 2in and 5in long.

Mrs Harnett, obviously practical, picked the 20 or so fish up and put them in her freezer. "At first I though someone was mucking around, but there were no children nearby," she said. The Harnett family must be attractive to dead fish. Some years earlier, her grandfather experienced something similar happening in nearby Welwyn Garden City.

However, those incidents pale when compared to the legendary fish attack of 1859, when John Lewis, of Mountain Ash, Glamorgan, was assaulted by thousands of fish. Lewis recounts being startled by things falling on his back, neck and head. Putting his hand down his neck, he found a small fish, while the brim of his hat was full of them.

The ground was covered with fish 1in to 3in long, and afterwards Lewis measured out an 80 x 12-yard strip of tiddlers. He threw many of them into rain pools, where they swam around happily. According to accounts at the time, Lewis said: "There were two showers with an interval of about 10 minutes, each lasting about two minutes."

Sounds like a hoax, doesn't it? A Cardiff zoologist Robert Drane, writing in the Zoologist on 18 May 1859, says: "From information obtained from many sources and from careful and minute enquiry, I am quite convinced that a great number of fish did actually descend with rain over a considerable tract of the country."

The incident was even reported in a letter to the Times on 2 March, where Aaron Peters, curate of St Peter's in Carmarthen, revealed there was a very stiff gale blowing from the south at the time. My first reaction to this story, which I read in an old copy of Fortean Times, was typical of an angler: what sort of fish were they? Apparently, they were sticklebacks, minnows, whiting and sprats, though the latter two are extremely unlikely because they are sea fish.

But what actually happened? One explanation suggested a whirlwind was responsible, a bit like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. A more prosaic theory of Mrs Harnett's experience came from a meteorologist. He said pockets of warm air can rise, picking up things from the water and dropping them on land, which sounds like the sort of joyless interpretation you'd expect from a weatherman.

Still, I guess it's better to be attacked by flying roach and sticklebacks than piranhas.