Hurricane Shark
Internet meme
Hurricane Shark and Street Shark are nicknames for several claimed instances of a live shark swimming in a flooded urban area, typically in the aftermath of a hurricane. For more than a decade (starting with Hurricane Irene in 2011), all media purporting to document such claims—most notably an image of a shark swimming on a flooded freeway—were debunked as fabrications. However, during Hurricane Ian in 2022, the Associated Press verified a video taken by Dominic Cameratta of a shark or other large fish swimming in flooded Fort Myers, Florida; one consulted expert concluded that the fish was "a juvenile shark" while another was unable to determine whether it was a shark. Both the re-emergence of the hoax in hurricane after hurricane and the eventual appearance of a plausible claim have been the subject of commentary and amusement; Daniel Victor of The New York Times described the Associated Press's findings as "like discovering Bigfoot is real".
Hoax images
Freeway image
The original "Hurricane Shark" image was created during Hurricane Irene in 2011, with a claim that the shark was on a street in Puerto Rico. According to The Washington Post, it likely originated on Reddit. In the aftermath of the hurricane, the image was aired by Miami Fox affiliate WSVN, was posted by the Miami Herald, and was widely shared on social media websites including Twitter.
The image was debunked by the Post, Snopes.com, and the Toronto Star. It had been created by combining an image of a flooded street in Puerto Rico with a photo of a shark taken by Thomas P. Peschak off of South Africa in 2003. The Post compared it to similar hoax images, such as one supposedly of Osama bin Laden's body following his death.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Hurricane Shark” as internet meme. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as internet meme. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q114342180. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2011, 2022 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hurricane Shark” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.