Lucky Break: Foot-Long Fish Survives Fall from the Sky

A man in Worcester, England, woke up to quite the surprise last week when he witnessed a fish literally fall from the sky. Upon realizing the creature was still alive, he drove it to a local pet store, Pet Link Aquatics & Reptiles, for help.

"He came to our store before we opened, banging on the door, and had a fish in a bucket," store manager Clive Longstaff tells PEOPLEPets.com. "We went to his car and indentified it as a sturgeon." But the real mystery still remained: In a land-locked area, where could this fish have possibly come from?

While no one knows the answer, Longstaff presumes the sturgeon was a pet that happened to have an unfortunate run-in with a heron or other hungry bird. "It was probably picked up from someone's garden pond, then struggled free," he says. "It doesn't appear to be injured at all." The sturgeon does have swollen, red gills, which Longstaff believes are a result of water deprivation. "It was rainy when this happened, so that may have kept him alive," he says.

Nicknamed "Stan the Sturgeon," the fish is living at the store until its owners can be located. "A lot of people have come to look at him," Longstaff says. "I think he's kind of famous now."

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Kate Hogan