SAUDI GAZETTE (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) 12 October 10 Mystery frogs in Al-Qariyat (Khalaf Al-Hamoud)
Al-Qariyat: One by one they started appearing. “I came across a couple in front of the house, and I presumed they’d come out of one of the neighbors’ houses, so I picked them up,” said Abdullah Al-Ruwaili, a resident of the Al-Faisaliya District of Al-Qariyat. “The next day, my brother Darhash found two in the bathroom.”
While it’s not unusual in this part of town to come across all manner of insects and bugs crawling out of cracks and drains, the sudden proliferation of frogs, by contrast, called for a community assembly.
“There was a whole lot of them jumping about like nobody’s business in the back yard of the house,” said Salim and Sami Al-Ruwaili. “So we got all the neighbors together in Abdullah’s house to put the matter up for discussion.”
The proceedings were interrupted, however, by the entrance of Tarif Al-Ruwaili, bearing in his hands two more frogs.
“In despair, we concluded the meeting there and then having decided there was clearly no solution,” Abdullah remarked. The regional office of the National Water Company (NWC) assured that the amphibians were not emerging from the drains. “I and other officials were called to Al-Faisaliya to investigate, and we opened up all the manholes and checked the drains, but found not a single frog,” said NWC official Salim Al-Enizi. “They might have come from farms in the area.”
Mystery frogs in Al-Qariyat