A viral video of a 'shark' swimming through a suburban Florida during Hurricane Ian has been confirmed to be real.
There have been plenty of social media posts in the past showing sea creatures roaming cities amid a catastrophic weather events that have blown up with engagement.
Pretty much all of them have been the clever work of Photoshop or After Effects and people have been reminded not to blindly share something they see on the internet.
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The same thing happened when Hurricane Ian slammed into Florida's coast this week.
A video claiming to show a shark flapping around in shallow water in Fort Myers popped up on Twitter and people were right to be skeptical after years of trolling.
Some people called out how the upload time to social media didn't correspond with how high the flood waters were are that point.
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Others suggested the video was taken from years ago.
However, it's finally been confirmed to be real, according to the Associated Press.
Fort Myers local Dominic Cameratta told the outlet he took the video on Wednesday (September 28) when he noticed something flapping around outside his home in Devonwood.
He noticed the floodwaters getting close to a friend's property and whipped out his phone to see what was going on.
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“I didn’t know what it was — it just looked like a fish or something,” he told The Associated Press. “I zoomed in, and all my friends are like, ‘It’s like a shark, man!’ ”
Cameratta's property is close to a small lake about half a mile east of Hendry Creek.
The jury is out on whether it's actually a shark or just a large fish. Experts were divided on the issue when interviewed with the Associated Press.
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Those who doubt the existence of a shark swimming through suburban areas questioned how it managed to get from the Gulf of Mexico to Fort Myers.
Yannis Papastamatiou, a marine biologist who studies shark behavior at Florida International University, explained to AP how that could occur.
“Young bull sharks are common inhabitants of low salinity waters — rivers, estuaries, subtropical embayments — and often appear in similar videos in FL water bodies connected to the sea such as coastal canals and ponds,” Burgess said.
“Assuming the location and date attributes are correct, it is likely this shark was swept shoreward with the rising seas.”
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Judging from some of the footage from where Hurricane Ian hit the hardest, it's not too hard to imagine how marine creatures managed to get inland.
The floodwaters were extremely high in some places and clearly it was enough to see a shark, or at least a large fish, roaming the streets.
Stewart Perrie