Old image of beached whale altered to show strange creature | Fact check

The claim: Image shows a giant creature lying on Mexico coast

[ En Español : Alteran imagen de ballena varada para simular extraña criatura ]

An Aug. 14 Facebook post ( direct lin k , archive link ) shows a crowd of people looking at a large creature on a beach.

“Disturbing creature appears on the coasts of México,” reads the post's caption in Spanish.

The same image has been shared for years on Facebook.

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Our rating: Altered

The photo has been digitally edited. The original photo was taken in 2011 in Chile, not Mexico, and the carcass on the beach was simply a whale.

Original photo showed whale carcass

The photo stems from an incident in November 2011, according to emol, the website for El Mercurio , a leading newspaper in Chile. The edited photo swaps the dead whale for an unidentifiable creature.

The emol version of this photo shows the original scene. The caption reports the dead whale attracted the attention of the residents of Coronel, a town about 300 miles south of Santiago , the capital of Chile. The photo was not taken in Mexico as the claim suggests.

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Worldwide, around 2,000 whales are stranded every year , a phenomenon called “beaching,” which happens frequently with sickness or injury, according to the Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida.

Researchers aren't sure why whales do this .

Pilot whales form tight social bonds that often last a lifetime, so experts say it's possible that other whales could follow if a member of the pod became ill and swam to the beach in distress. Others speculate that beached whales could have become disoriented due to noises in the water, such as from humans.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Snopes also debunked a version of this image in 2016.

Our fact-check sources:

• Emol, Nov. 3, 2011, Remains of a whale that ran aground on Coronel beach were towed to the sea
• Fish & Wildlife Foundation of Florida, accessed Aug. 19, Why Do Whales Beach Themse lves?

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Old image of beached whale altered to show strange creature | Fact check