Viral: Shark spotted swimming in flooded streets

An eye-popping video went viral on social media which showed a large, dark fish with sharp dorsal fins swimming in flooded streets of Fort Myers city of Florida’s Lee County after Hurricane Ion.

The eye-popping video, which showed a large, dark fish with sharp dorsal fins thrashing around an inundated Fort Myers backyard, racked up more than 13 million views on Twitter within a day, as users responded with disbelief and comparisons to the “Sharknado” film series.

A local real estate developer namely Dominic Cameratta confirmed that he filmed the clip from his back patio Wednesday morning when he saw something “flopping around” in his neighbour’s flooded yard.

@Gutfeldfox somehow a shark ended up in a Fort Myers neighborhood during Hurricane Ian.. 😬 pic.twitter.com/l3WbzgNQHj

— Brad Habuda (@BradHabuda) September 28, 2022

He said, “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!’” He guessed the fish was about 4 feet in length.

George Burgess, former director of the Florida Museum of Natural History’s shark program, said in an email that it “appears to be a juvenile shark,” while Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, director of the University of Miami’s shark conservation program, wrote that “it’s pretty hard to tell.”

Some Twitter users dubbed the hapless fish the “street shark.”

Cameratta said the flooding had only just begun when the clip was taken, but that the waters were “all the way up to our house” by the time the AP reached him by phone Wednesday evening.

He said the fish may have made its way up from nearby Hendry Creek into a retention pond, which then overflowed, spilling the creature into his neighbor’s backyard. A visual analysis of nearby property confirmed it matches the physical landmarks in the video.

Leslie Guelcher, a professor of intelligence studies at Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania, was among the online sleuths who initially thought the video was fake.

“Don’t think this is real. According to the index on the video it was created in June 2010. Someone else posted it at 10 AM as in Fort Myers, but the storm surge wasn’t like that at 10 AM,” she tweeted Wednesday.

Guelcher acknowledged later, though, that online tools she and others were using to establish the video’s origins didn’t actually show when the video itself was created, merely when the social media profile of the user was created.

The AP confirmed through the original clip’s metadata that it was captured Wednesday morning.