In late September 2025, an image claiming to show an octopus helping a diver with underwater maintenance tasks began circulating on Facebook. One version (archived), included the following caption:
The helping octopus. An octopus was first spotted off the coast of Portugal, hovering near a diver as he worked on underwater repairs. At first, the diver thought nothing of it, until the octopus started helping.
Whenever he reached for a wrench, a bolt, or even dropped a tool, a tentacle would appear, handing it back to him like a silent assistant from the deep.
No one believed his stories when he surfaced, so he set up cameras and recorded everything. The footage, an octopus calmly passing tools to a human, has since gone viral. When asked about it, the diver just smiled and said: "I'm just happy I had help down there."
(Facebook user Sanduni Sewwandi)
The image, which appeared to show a diver receiving a wrench from an octopus, quickly went viral, accumulating thousands of reactions, comments and shares. Some commenters hailed it as evidence of the octopus' intelligence. Snopes received multiple reader inquiries about the authenticity of both the image and the story.
Multiple other Facebook users shared the story. It also spread to other platforms — for instance, only one X post (archived) received over 700,000 views, while a LinkedIn post garnered more than 2,000 reactions.
However, there was no evidence that this event ever occurred. The image was created using a screenshot from a real diving video and digitally altered to insert an octopus holding a wrench. As such, we rated this claim fake.
Source of the image
The image in question showed a diver underwater with an octopus appearing to hand a large wrench toward the diver. However, a closer examination raised multiple red flags. For instance, Google reverse-image search indicated that the photo was only shared through social media posts and did not appear in any credible news or scientific sources.
Moreover, the image was based on a frame from an authentic video uploaded to YouTube on Dec. 11, 2018, titled, "Saturation Diving 2018." The video's description read: "Closed Bell Diving from a Diving support vessel in the North Sea."
The original footage, posted by YouTube user @diverandy77, contained no octopus, let alone one assisting with tools. This indicates the image was digitally edited, possibly with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, to insert the octopus into an existing underwater scene.
(Facebook user Sanduni Sewwandi, YouTube user @diverandy77)
Additional versions of the image appeared to be even more heavily edited, featuring unnaturally smooth textures and blurred details — visual cues often associated with AI-generated or heavily retouched images.
(Facebook user Rina Khatun)
Some versions of the post redirected users to advertisement-filled websites, suggesting the story may have been fabricated primarily to generate click-based revenue.
All in all, no reputable news source or marine organization had reported any verified case of an octopus behaving this way in the wild or in captivity.
For further reading, we previously looked into a rumor that an image taken by wildlife cameras in Yellowstone National Park depicted an authentic situation in which a mountain lion raised two wolf cubs.