On a tropical day during my summer vacation in Guatemala this year, I saw what nobody expected to see. After an afternoon rain shower, a young man in the neighborhood where I was visiting went to his daily job, fishing in the edge of a river. After a fair catch, Alberto Mayan, a citizen of a small Guatemalan pueblo, caught a strange “thing” that has never been seen in the rivers of Guatemala. The word spread quickly as he headed home with it in a bucket. As the word went speeding down the streets like wild fire, people came out to see the strange phenomena.

Someone came to my house to get me to go see the weird thing with him. Of course I was curious, so I went to the fisherman’s home. There he was, charging people to look at his catch. He told me that he called it “ pes sapo” [fish frog] in Spanish.

“It’s unbelievable that I found this on a regular days’ fishing. I am amazed how big and weird it is”. He said that it’s too big to be a tadpole and it’s too weird to be a catfish. Then I saw it. I realized it was all true; it had four eyes on its head. It had legs growing out of its back end, yet it still had a tail like a fish.

Can you see the 4 eyes on this “pes sapo” (fish frog)?

Plus, it had front legs like a frog, but it was still too big to be a tadpole.

When I talked to the neighbors about this might have happened to grow here in this small Guatemala river, they told me that there’s a nearby nuclear power plant that they many people from the pueblo work for, but they never heard of any mutations. My guess is that there might be illegal waste dumping in nearby rivers causing mutations - but who knows? Have you ever seen anything like this?