When Hurricane Ian hit Florida, it revived an old myth that the suburbs were home to marine life. A viral video of a shark swimming in a Fort Myers backyard has now been confirmed as real footage.
With over 13 million views on Twitter, the video showed a large, dark fish with sharp dorsal fins thrashing about in flood waters, as users reacted in disbelief, with some dismissing it as fake.
The unfortunate fish was quickly branded a “street shark” as users drew a parallel to the cult-classic Sharknado, a 2013 disaster comedy in which sharks are pulled from the ocean after a waterspout and dumped in suburban Los Angeles.
The video was first tweeted by Brad Habuda from Fort Myers on Wednesday afternoon. But it wasn’t him who filmed the moment. Neither did Ed Bell, the person he credited in a follow-up tweet. It was Dominic Cametta, a local real estate developer, who shot the video.
He confirmed filming the video from his backyard on Wednesday morning when he saw something “circling” in his neighbor’s flooded garden.
“I didn’t know what it was, it just looked like a fish or something,” he told the Associated Press. “I went and all my friends were like, ‘It’s like a shark, man!'”
The video began spreading after he posted it in a group chat on WhatsApp on Wednesday morning, according to his friend John Paul Murray, who sent the AP a time-stamped screenshot.
However, the sea creature’s identity has yet to be confirmed as experts had differing opinions as to whether it was a shark or a fish.
“It appears to be a juvenile shark,” said George Burgess, former director of the shark program at the Florida Museum of Natural History, while Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, director of the University of Miami Shark Conservation Program, wrote, “It’s kind of hard to say.”
The fish may have washed out of nearby Hendry Creek into a retention pond that flooded after being hit by Hurricane Ian, Cameratta says.
“From a flooding perspective, it makes a little more sense” that the fish was sighted near an overflowing pond, said Leslie Guelcher, a professor of intelligence studies at Mercyhurst University in Pennsylvania. Even among those who initially dismissed the video as fake, she asked, “But how the hell would a shark from the Gulf of Mexico get into a holding pond?”
Most sharks flee shallow bays before hurricanes arrive, possibly alarmed by a change in barometric pressure, said Yannis Papastamatiou, a marine biologist who studies shark behavior at Florida International University. So it’s possible that it accidentally floats into the creek or gets swept into it, he said.
“Juvenile bull sharks are common residents of low-salinity waters (rivers, estuaries, subtropical bays) and often appear on similar videos in Florida’s ocean-connected waters, such as coastal channels and ponds,” Burgess said.
“Assuming the location and date attributes are correct, it is likely that this shark washed ashore as sea levels rose.”
More cable reports.