How Hurricane Jan crashed into Florida late last month, scenes of the aftermath and destruction were widely shared on social media, much of it real.
But hurricanes have also become notorious for spreading fake news, especially with seemingly strange interactions with animals during a storm.
One video of a seal flopping down a city street that went viral after Hurricane Ian has now been debunked. The footage is real, but taken many years ago in Chile — not last month in Florida.
The video shows a large gray seal on a city sidewalk in what appears to be the aftermath of a thunderstorm. The videos have been shared relatively widely since last month’s hurricane, with one tweet purporting to attribute the seal footage to Ian having nearly 400,000 “likes” and more than 25 million views.
But the footage was actually taken from the Chilean coastal city of Puerto Cisnes and was shot in 2020, reports Reuters.
It’s about an elephant seal — a huge animal weighing several thousand pounds — that ended up in a Chilean town one night before being herded back into the ocean by residents using a large tarp as Guardian reported at the time.
A recent viral tweet showed just a few seconds of a seal slithering across the pavement. But the animal’s gigantic size and quintessential proboscis are still evident – the first clue that this footage was not taken from Hurricane Ian, as there is no sea elephants lives in the wild in Florida.
The animal in the video is a southern elephant seal that lives in the extreme southern oceans around Antarctica, Chile and Argentina and only rarely makes it north of New Zealand. Another related species, the northern elephant seal, lives in North America, but only along the Pacific coast from California through Alaska, not in the Atlantic or Gulf of Mexico around Florida.
Although no seal species is a regular resident of Florida, some seals from the North Atlantic Ocean have been spotted as far south as the Sunshine State.
But Florida is world-famous for its manatees, a type of gray and round, whiskered-faced marine mammal that inhabits the coastal waters of the southern part of the state.
Unlike the elephant seal video, some footage that has gone viral on social media does indeed show the effects of Hurricane Yang – including personnel of what looked like a shark thrashing in a flooded street.
And other wildlife in Southwest Florida emerged after the storm. Last week, the fire chief on Sanibel Island, which saw widespread devastation from Hurricane Ian, said CNN that there were “alligators running around and there are snakes everywhere.”
