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Viral Photo Of Giant Bullfrog: Real Or Fake?

A photo of a giant bullfrog is stirring controversy on social media.

The South Texas Hunter’s Association posted the photo on Facebook on Thursday, where it was shared more than 260,000 times. A hunter holds up the “monster” frog, which weighed in at a whopping 13 pounds, according to the post.

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But despite the viral reach of the photo, some are questioning its authenticity.

“Look at the 2 pics back ground they are different,” wrote one commenter. Several others commented that the shocking image was either edited on Photoshop or completely fake.

A spokesman for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department confirmed that the photo was real, the Houston Chronicle reports. But there’s a catch:

“It’s not as bigly as it appears,” Steve Lightfoot said in the report, adding that the gargantuan size of the creature was due to an optical illusion caused by extending the frog toward the camera.

“[It’s] similar to what you see with fishermen holding up fish to make them appear larger,” he said.

Myth-busting website Snopes.com was also skeptical, saying that 13 pounds is “simply too big for a frog.”

“Adult American Bullfrogs, the largest frogs in the United States, only weigh about 1.5 pounds,” the website wrote. “The largest frog in the world, the Goliath Frog, is also too small to meet the requirements of this claim.”

Like Lightfoot, Snopes suspects the image may be an illusion. The term the site uses is “forced perspective,” a photography technique that makes objects in the foreground of an image appear much larger than objects in the background.

To achieve this effect in the photo, Snopes says the hunter may have been using a gig pole to hold the frog closer to the camera.

Markcuz Rangel, the hunter holding up the gigantic bullfrog, claims the photo is real despite the dubious attitudes of skeptics.

“The photo is real and I’ve got others from the same area, just not as big but still big bullfrogs,” Rangel told KFOX14.

He continued to tell the station he regrets not taking more pictures and video of the bullfrog to prove it wasn’t a hoax.

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