Claim:
An image shared online in December 2025 was an authentic drone picture of a gargantuan octopus spotted in the Gulf of Mexico.
Rating:
In December 2025, social media users shared an image of a frightful monster from the deep. The image, which appeared to show a giant octopus not far off a coastline, included text that read: “A drone captured a giant octopus off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, larger than anything science has ever recorded.”
One popular post (archived) described the octopus as 50 feet across and claimed the image was not generated by artificial intelligence tools, saying it had been “officially verified as authentic.”
Similar posts featuring the same image spread across platforms such as Instagram (archived) and Facebook (archived). Users also had shared the image months earlier on Instagram (archived), Reddit (archived) and Facebook (archived). Several Snopes readers sent us emails asking whether the image and accompanying story were real.
Neither was real, however. The image was a screenshot of an AI-generated video, despite claims to the contrary. Therefore, we’ve rated this claim as a fake.
The oldest post Snopes could find about this particular octopus was a Sept. 18, 2025, TikTok video (archived). The video’s caption included many of the same details as those in later social media posts, including the nickname “eclipse octopus,” references to its tentacles being the size of a bus and similar sizing at 45 feet across. The images posted to social media appeared to be screenshots of this video.
That video was posted by the account @connarclips (archived), the description of which bolded the letters “AI” in the phrase “Clips of UnexplAInable Events.” The account appeared to specialize in posting AI-generated videos, many of which were about supposedly extraordinary animals. One such video was about a humongous anaconda swimming in a river reminiscent of the AI-generated giant anaconda videos Snopes fact-checked earlier in 2025.
The account posted seven different videos about the supposed world’s largest octopus within a month, four of which appeared to be the same octopus. The first was the octopus video from Sept. 18. The next video (archived) of the same octopus was posted Oct. 9, the first of three videos about it in a span of two days. In that video, the octopus was apparently 84 feet long. By the next video (archived), it was more than 100 feet in length. The next video (archived), posted that very same day, claimed the octopus was more than 450 feet long. Most of the text in the caption for that last video was word-for-word the same text that made up part of the original video’s caption.
The dronelike audio heard in three of the four videos was not of the drone apparently getting footage of the octopus but was instead a borrowed sound effect, according to the video descriptions.
While the screenshots shared in social media posts were of too low quality to count the number of arms on the octopus, the number of limbs could clearly be seen in most of the videos. The octopus in the first two videos had 11 arms, while the octopus in the last video had seven, maybe eight, arms. The octopus in the third video was too misshapen to determine exactly how many arms it had, but only four were visible on screen. Octopi generally have eight arms. In the very rare instances where an octopus may have more arms, it is likely caused by an injury or defect causing more arms to split from a main arm, of which there are still usually no more than eight.
Another clue the videos were likely AI-generated could be found by observing the water immediately around the octopus in the first and fourth videos. Even though the water had the rippling appearance of waves, the ripples around the octopus near the end of both videos appeared entirely motionless and unnatural.
While AI-detection tools can sometimes be inaccurate and should therefore not be relied upon alone to determine whether a video or image is AI-generated, one such tool, Hive, supported Snopes’ analysis and rated the video to have a 99.9% likelihood of being generated by AI, most likely with OpenAI’s Sora tool.
The video’s captions referenced a Gulf Marine Institute and a marine biologist named Elena Vargas. While there were no organizations that matched that name exactly, there is a Gulf World Marine Institute as well as a Gulf Marine Institute of Technology. The former focuses on the recovery of injured or sick marine mammals and turtles, while the latter is focused on seafood farming technology. As for the marine biologist, there is a real-life scientist named Elena Vargas-Fonseca. However, she was a marine ecologist, which involves the study of ecosystems and the environments in which life lives, and not a marine biologist, which involves the direct study of living organisms.
Vargas-Fonseca did not have any research on giant octopuses on her ResearchGate profile. Snopes could find any research papers on Google Scholar about a giant or record-breaking octopus discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. Snopes also could not find credible news reporting on the octopus, although did find that scientists captured footage of a giant squid in the Gulf of Mexico in 2020.
Snopes has previously fact-checked many other AI-generated videos and images of animals, including one meant to depict a raccoon that broke into a liquor store.
