Is This a Really Giant Squid — Or Fake Photo?

A photo that has been shared online for years allegedly shows a giant squid washed up on a beach.

In early January 2025, an X user posted the photograph at the top of a thread supposedly showing the "terrifying beauty" of the ocean (archived). The photo showed a man in a wetsuit kneeling beside what appeared to be the large, tentacled, white-hued squid. The post had amassed more than 488,000 views as of this writing.

The photo was genuine and not a product of digital editing or artificial intelligence (AI) technology. A reverse image search using TinEye returned hundreds of examples of the picture, including an article The New Zealand Herald newspaper published in late August 2018.

The photo was originally published by the OCEAN HUNTER Spearfishing & Freediving Specialists Facebook page, which describes itself on a linked website as "New Zealand's retailer of the world-leading brands of spearfishing and freediving equipment."

Snopes contacted the company to learn more about the photo and will update this article if we receive a response. 

Keith Lyons, senior media adviser for the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research in New Zealand, confirmed via email that, at the time of the photo, an external expert identified the species as a giant squid with the scientific name Architeuthis dux.

The New Zealand Herald wrote that three brothers — Daniel, Jack and Matthew Aplin — discovered the squid while driving along a track on the south coast of Wellington, the country's capital. Snopes reached out to Daniel and Matthew Aplin over Facebook for more information about when and where the photo was taken. We will update this article if we receive responses.

"My brother said 'what's that over there?' and pointed it out," Daniel Aplin said, according to The New Zealand Herald. "It was right next to the track so we pulled over and we were like: 'It's a big squid.'"

"After we went for a dive we went back to it and got a tape measure out and it measured 4.2 meters [13.7 feet] long," he added. 

About the Giant Squid Species

In 2019, researchers recorded a giant squid swimming at a depth of nearly 2,500 feet in the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wrote at the time:

In the video, the giant squid, at least 3 to 3.7 meters (10 to 12 feet) in length, can be seen approaching the Medusa's e-jelly lure at a depth of 759 meters (2,490 feet) before realizing the e-jelly is not food and retreating. This marked the first time that a giant squid had been filmed in U.S. waters and only the second time one had been filmed alive anywhere.

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History reported that the largest giant squid ever recorded was nearly 43 feet long and "may have weighed nearly a ton."

According to the Australian Museum, the giant squid belongs to a genus often referred to as "monsters of the deep." 

Giant Squids are the largest of all the living cephalopods and the largest individual invertebrate in the world. There is still little known of the identity, distributions, biology and behaviour of giant squids.

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Two thirds of the length of these squids is made up by a pair of long feeding tentacles each bearing an elongate club on the tip. These metre-long tips bear large suckers armed with toothed horny rings.

The National History Museum noted that no photos of a live giant squid existed until 2004. The first video of the species in its natural habitat emerged in 2013.