Two divers, one turtle, and a number so big I had to check it three times: Rockstar is building a second map under the water, and it has teeth.
By Ruan Martini, Daily Checkpoint. November 2, 2026.
There is one screenshot from GTA 6 that I keep going back to, and it is not a car, not a gun, not a neon street in Vice City. It is the underwater one from the Leonida Keys, the one Rockstar put on the official site. Two divers in full scuba gear, tanks on their backs, fins out, drifting over a coral reef. In front of them, close enough to the camera to steal the whole picture, a sea turtle paddles past like it pays rent down there. An eel slides along the rocks on the left. Schools of little tropical fish hang in the blue above the coral. Purple sea fans, sponges, sunlight coming down through the surface in sheets.
I stared at that image for a long time, and here is the thought that would not leave: this is not a backdrop. Games make backdrops all the time. You swim out, the water is blue, there is a generic fish or two, you get bored, you swim back. Nobody builds a reef like that, with that many living things arranged that carefully, unless the ocean is a place you are meant to actually go. So I went and checked what is really confirmed about GTA 6 underwater, about the animals, about the hunting, because the internet is currently out there promising people a full nature documentary with guns. Some of that is true. Some of it is not. Let me show you which is which, because honestly, the true part is already wild enough.
What One Screenshot Actually Confirms
Start with the floor, the stuff Rockstar itself has shown, because the floor here is higher than people realize.
Scuba diving is confirmed. Not rumored, not leaked, confirmed. The screenshot I described is official Rockstar material for the Leonida Keys, and diving also shows up in the activity montage of the Extended Look, Rockstar’s big gameplay showcase. In that same montage and across the official material you can see swimming, kayaking and jet skiing too. Kayaking, by the way, is a first for the GTA series. We have stolen planes, trains, submarines and one very memorable blimp, but nobody at Rockstar ever handed us a kayak before. Florida is a state where the water is not scenery, it is infrastructure, and for once the game is treating it that way.
The official description Rockstar wrote for the Leonida Keys calls them, and I love this, “some of the most beautiful and dangerous waters in all of America.” Beautiful, we can see. Dangerous is a promise we will come back to.
Now the honest limit, because there is one and it matters. Rockstar has not described what divers actually do down there. Nobody official has said a word about underwater treasure, sunken loot, collectibles, missions that start at the bottom of the sea. In GTA 5, the ocean was mostly a beautiful blue nothing with a couple of collectible hunts bolted on, and most players touched it once and never went back. GTA 6 is clearly building something richer to look at. Whether it is richer to do is a question Rockstar is keeping in its pocket for now. I keep a running list of exactly this kind of confirmed versus unknown split in everything we know about GTA 6 so far, and the ocean section of that list is fatter than I expected when I started it.
So the confirmed floor is: diving exists, the gear exists, the reef exists, the Keys are the place, and the water activities around it are real. Everything beyond that is either reporting, reading between the lines, or hope. Good. Now let us talk about the number, because the number is the reason I wrote this piece.
The 170 Number Is Not a Typo
In the Game Informer cover story published September 29, 2026, Michael Kane, who is Rockstar’s vice president of Dynamic Art, put a number on Leonida’s wildlife: more than 170 animal species. Not 17. Not “dozens.” More than 170, and he broke it down: over 60 kinds of birds, more than 30 land mammals, plus fish and reptiles on top of that. He named names, too. Manatees. Flamingos. Pelicans. Alligators. And then the detail that made me laugh out loud, because it is such a Florida detail: the invasive species are in. Green iguanas, cane toads, feral cats, rhesus macaques. Rockstar did not just copy Florida’s postcard animals. They copied Florida’s pest problem.
Why does the number matter? Because of who is saying it and where this studio has been. The last time Rockstar cared this much about animals, the game was Red Dead Redemption 2, and its wildlife was not decoration, it was a system: animals you tracked, studied, hunted, skinned, sold, animals with rarity tiers and a handful of legendary ones that half the internet turned into personal quests. GTA has never worked like that. In GTA, animals were garnish. A deer on a hillside in GTA 5 was a screensaver that could run away. So when the Dynamic Art VP of the whole studio stands up in a cover story and counts species like a proud zookeeper, in a crime game, about a map where you rob stores and flee the police, that is a statement of intent. Something in this game’s design wants you out there in the wild, looking at the wild.
Game Informer added the piece that connects the dots: some of these animals can be tracked, and they are sorted into Rare, Discoverable and Legendary categories. Rockstar is keeping which animals sit in which tier a secret. Read that again and tell me it does not sound like a certain cowboy game wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I am not saying GTA 6 has RDR2’s hunting system copy and pasted into Leonida. Nobody has confirmed that, and I will hold the line on it further down. I am saying the vocabulary is not an accident. Studios do not borrow the word “Legendary” for animals by coincidence, not this studio, not after that game.
Where does it stand right now? The 170 plus count is confirmed by Rockstar through Game Informer. The tiers are confirmed as categories. Everything about what tracking actually involves, what you get for it, whether there is a logbook filling up like a Pokedex for criminals, is unconfirmed. Even the people who have played the game are working from a slice: when Edge played GTA 6 and reported back, their 90 minutes barely scratched the systems underneath the story. The animal system is one of the biggest open files in the whole game, and the receipts we do have say it is much bigger than garnish.
The Ocean Is a Second Map
Let me make the case the way it formed in my head, starting at the bottom of the map and the bottom of the sea.
The Leonida Keys are Rockstar’s version of the Florida Keys, the island chain hanging off the bottom of Florida. In the real world, just offshore from those islands, sits the Florida Reef, the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States. It is a whole second geography down there, hundreds of species stacked into one glowing neighborhood, and people travel from all over the world just to float over it with a mask on. I wrote before about how Rockstar is rebuilding real Miami places inside Vice City, and the reef is the same move, played underwater: the most famous piece of nature in the real Keys is the reef, so the Leonida Keys get a reef, built dense enough to headline an official screenshot.
And it is not just coral in the picture. Kane, in that same Game Informer story, talked about the ocean specifically: several species of sharks, whales, rays, turtles and jellyfish, and he made a point that matters more than the list. These animals, in his telling, move and behave like themselves, distinct from each other, instead of being interchangeable decorations with fins. That is the difference between a screensaver and an ecosystem. A turtle that drifts like a turtle and a ray that glides like a ray and a jellyfish that pulses along minding its own business sounds like a small thing until you remember what ocean life in open world games usually is: one fish, cloned ten thousand times, all of them swimming in the same circle, waiting for nobody.
The community has done its usual frame by frame archaeology on the official trailers and screenshots, and the spotted list for the water alone is already fun: bottlenose dolphins riding along in trailer footage, a loggerhead sea turtle matching the one in the diving shot, a manatee identified in official material, eels in the reef screenshots. Manatees deserve a pause. A manatee is the least GTA animal ever designed by nature. It is a slow, gentle, thousand pound sea potato that Florida protects like a national treasure, and it is apparently going to be drifting around Leonida’s waterways while I commit felonies nearby. I cannot wait. If there is a wanted level for even bumping one of those angels with a boat, I will respect it completely and I will still probably earn it by accident.
Put it together and the ocean stops looking like the edge of the map. In GTA 5, the map ended at the waterline for most players, most of the time. In GTA 6, the confirmed material describes a reef worth visiting, a species list with triple digits behind it, and a studio art director bragging about animal behavior. Where it stands: the place is confirmed, the residents are confirmed, the invitation is obvious. What you do there for twenty hours is the part still under wraps.
Yes, There Are Teeth Down There
Now the part the person in that story screenshot was actually asking about, the part everybody asks me about: how dangerous is the water?
Here is what is solid. Multiple species of sharks are confirmed for GTA 6, confirmed by Rockstar through Kane’s Game Informer comments, not by a blurry leak. Sharks are in Leonida’s ocean, and more than one kind. Rockstar’s own Keys description, remember, sells the water as beautiful and dangerous in the same breath. And if you remember GTA 5, you remember that its ocean had exactly one shark personality: it found you, it circled you, and if you were swimming out past the buoys like an idiot, it finished the conversation. The precedent in this series is that open water is not safe water.
Here is what is not solid, and I want to be careful, because this is where the internet starts writing checks. Nobody official has confirmed that sharks attack divers in GTA 6, how they behave, or what happens when one notices you. Rockstar has not described hazards for divers at all: no word on oxygen rules, currents, or what the dangerous half of “beautiful and dangerous” actually does to you. Fans going through trailer frames believe they have identified a tiger shark in one shot. Maybe. That identification is tentative, one frame, one shape, and I am not printing it as fact. It would be very Florida, tiger sharks are real Keys residents, but “would be very Florida” is a vibe, not a source.
My honest read, opinion, flagged as opinion: a studio does not put several shark species with distinct behaviors into a diving playground and make them all harmless. Something down there is going to have opinions about you. But the day Rockstar confirms shark behavior is the day I write it as fact, and that day has not come yet. Until then the correct sentence is: the teeth exist, the bite is unconfirmed.
Back on Land: Rifles, Deer and a Price Tag Nobody Published
The wild does not stop at the shoreline, and neither does the confirmed list. Hunting is an official activity in GTA 6, listed by Rockstar on its own website, and the official material points it at one place in particular: Mount Kalaga National Park, the big wilderness in Leonida’s north. This is not trailer tea leaf reading. Rockstar’s screenshots show hunters carrying rifles in that country, and one of the official shots shows Jason himself approaching deer with a rifle in hand. Deer, plural, in the open, with the protagonist closing in on foot. You do not stage that screenshot by accident. Somebody at Rockstar wanted you to see it and start asking exactly the questions I am asking.
The frame by frame spotters have built the land list too, from official trailers and screenshots: alligators everywhere, obviously, plus green iguanas, wild boar, raccoons, a Florida panther, snakes, dogs including a Chihuahua living its best life, cats, flamingos and pelicans and herring gulls along the coasts, and a Key deer, which is a real and famously tiny deer that lives only in the real Florida Keys. A miniature deer, protected in real life, wandering a game where my first instinct with any new animal is to see if the game lets me interact with it. Rockstar knows what it is doing to us.
The alligator gets its own sentence because it has earned it: no animal in this game has done more free marketing. It waddles through the trailers, it hauls itself out of pools, and it is the one species where the real Florida headlines are somehow less believable than the game. I already wrote a whole piece about the real Florida Man stories GTA 6 bottled into Leonida, and half of it is gators, because Florida keeps supplying the material faster than anyone can invent it.
Now the money question, because hunting in a GTA game eventually becomes a money question. Does hunting pay? The strongest signal we have is a quote from Rob Nelson, Rockstar North’s studio head, relayed by the creator TGG from preview conversations: hunting makes money. That is a real quote from a real Rockstar boss, reported secondhand, and I am treating it as exactly that, a strong hint with a named source, not a published system. Because here is where it stands: Rockstar has published no list of which species you can hunt, no prices, no mechanics, no word on whether the Legendary tier pays out, gets mounted on a wall, or just gets logged with a little gold star. The activity is confirmed. The economy is a rumor with a good pedigree. Those are different things and I am keeping them in different boxes until launch.
The Honest Unknowns
My favorite section of any piece I write, the box where the hype goes to get audited. As of today, here is what nobody outside Rockstar can honestly tell you about GTA 6 and its animals:
Which animals can you hunt? Unknown. No official list exists. Any site showing you a tidy table of huntable species and prices is inventing it.
Is there loot underwater? Unknown. The reef is confirmed as a place with diving as an activity. Treasure, wrecks with cargo, collectible hunts, none of it has been described by Rockstar.
How deep is fishing? Unknown. Fishing keeps surfacing around the game’s water activities, and Florida is one of the great fishing stages on Earth, but no official material has shown how the system works or how much of the game it is.
Do the animals touch the story? Unknown. Everything confirmed so far lives in the open world and the activity list. Whether Jason and Lucia’s story ever sends you into the wild, nobody has said.
Can you keep track of all 170 plus? Half known. The Rare, Discoverable and Legendary tiers are confirmed by Game Informer, and tracking is confirmed as a thing some animals support. A full checklist, a field guide, a percentage counter for the completionists: not confirmed, just very easy to imagine, and I say that as a man who would absolutely ruin two weekends completing it.
My Plan, and One Question for You
Launch is November 19, and I will be playing on PS5 Pro, testing this game’s systems the way I test everything: by poking them until they confess. And I already know one of my first detours. Before the story pulls me anywhere, I am taking a boat down to the Keys, I am putting on the scuba gear, and I am going down to that reef to see the turtle, count what I can count, and find out firsthand whether the dangerous half of Rockstar’s promise has fins. If the wildlife in this game is half the system the 170 number hints at, the ocean and the woods are not side content. They are the second game, hiding inside the crime game, and I intend to live in it.
So tell me, honestly, which one are you: are you going down to the reef on day one to see what is living down there, or are you heading up to Mount Kalaga with a rifle to find out what Legendary means in Leonida? Reef or rifle. I am reading every answer, and the best ones are getting argued with, politely, in the replies.
Sources
Game Informer, GTA 6 cover story, September 29, 2026: Michael Kane (VP, Dynamic Art, Rockstar Games) on the 170 plus species count, the birds and mammals breakdown, the named species, the marine life and distinct animal behaviors, and the Rare, Discoverable and Legendary tracking categories.
Rockstar Games, official GTA VI website and official screenshots: the Leonida Keys scuba diving screenshot (two divers, a sea turtle, eels and reef fish), the official Leonida Keys description, hunting listed as an official activity, and the Mount Kalaga hunting screenshots.
Rockstar Games, GTA VI Extended Look: the activity montage showing scuba diving, swimming, kayaking and jet skiing.
The Games Wiki (thegameswiki.com), Scuba Diving and Swimming and Diving pages, and GTA Wiki (gta.fandom.com), official screenshot archives, used to cross check the confirmed details and the screenshot’s contents. Rob Nelson’s comment that hunting makes money was reported via the creator TGG’s preview coverage.