GTA 6 Wildlife and Weather: Animals, Storms and Hurricanes

Leonida is not just a city with some swamp attached. It has gators in the wetlands, a cougar hunting deer up north, iguanas wandering into traffic in the Keys, and, according to Game Informer, more than 170 animal species and full-on hurricanes. That last part is the bit everyone repeats. It is also the bit that Rockstar has not put on its own pages.

So this page splits the two cleanly. First, what Rockstar itself has shown, in its trailers and in the image descriptions on its GTA VI site. Then what Game Informer reported from its Sep 29 2026 cover story, and how other outlets added to it. Every animal and every weather effect gets its own row and its own source.

At a glance

What is counted, and how

CONFIRMED means Rockstar shows or says it: the region copy and image descriptions on rockstargames.com/VI, the Newswire, and Rockstar's trailers. For trailer moments we name the outlet whose breakdown we used, since Rockstar does not caption its videos.

REPORT means an outlet says it, even when it quotes a Rockstar developer. Game Informer's full cover story is subscriber-only. We read its free articles, plus VGC, Kotaku, Dexerto and GamesRadar+ pieces that quote the magazine. Where they differ, we show both.

We did not use leaked footage, leak-based "wildlife lists" or fan wikis.

CONFIRMED: what Rockstar has shown

Rockstar writes a short description for each screenshot on its Only in Leonida page. Read together, they make a decent field guide.

• The Grassrivers are gator country. Rockstar's copy says the gators "may be the most famous attraction," but warns of "far deadlier predators and weirder discoveries among the mangroves." Its images show an airboat surrounded by alligators, a police chase through a swamp full of them, and three mud-covered people with guns posing on an airboat with a dead alligator and a wildcat.
• The Keys have reefs. One image shows two scuba divers among coral, fish, an eel and a sea turtle. Another shows an iguana walking in front of a mobility scooter, which is about as Florida as a screenshot gets.
• Mount Kalaga has predators. "A cougar stalks a herd of deer drinking from a stream." Rockstar's region copy promises "prime hunting, fishing, and off-road trails."
• Dolphins at sea. The Ultimate Edition's Shitzu Squalo boat is pictured with dolphins swimming nearby.
• The cover art includes a flamingo flying over a speedboat and a gator in the water, per Rockstar's own description of it.

The trailers add Florida chaos. PC Gamer's scene-by-scene breakdown of Trailer 1 describes a social media clip of a man fishing a crocodile, as PC Gamer calls it, out of a backyard pool, captioned with a warning to check for "uninvited guests" before a pool party, then CCTV of one walking into a cafe. It also spotted airboats in the wetlands and a tiny dog breed GTA V did not have.

On weather, Rockstar's own pages say very little. Its image descriptions show sunsets and night scenes, such as a crop field burning at sunset in Ambrosia. The one weather nod is on the radio: Back Country Radio's Mud Dog Mike is, in Rockstar's words, a "roving reporter, swamp meteorologist," broadcasting from his Grassrivers airboat.

REPORT: Game Informer's cover story, Sep 29 2026

Game Informer's November 2026 issue, number 382, carries a 14-page GTA VI cover story built on interviews with Rockstar developers and 12 new screenshots. Its writer, Marcus Stewart, describes himself as a lifelong South Floridian. Two free articles went up with the digital issue on Sep 29.

Wildlife. Game Informer reports that Leonida will have over 170 species across land, air and sea, several of them new to Rockstar games. It names native animals, including flamingos, manatees, pelicans and alligators, and invasive ones, including green iguanas, cane toads, feral cats and rhesus macaque monkeys. Animals will show iridescence, bioluminescence, translucency and different feather types, with new hair and fur systems. Some animals can be tracked in three tiers, Rare, Discoverable and Legendary, and Rockstar is keeping those species secret.

Weather. Game Informer reports dynamic cloudscapes rolling across the map and localized storms, so you can stand in the sun and watch it pour somewhere else. Puddles and wet surfaces stay after a storm passes, and rainbows can appear after a shower. Like Florida, Leonida gets tropical storms and seasonal hurricanes. Game Informer says it does not know how often the big storms come, or how they affect gameplay and the story.

Our news brief covered the day the story dropped.

REPORT: what other outlets added from the magazine

Other outlets quoted parts of the cover story that are not in Game Informer's free articles.

• The weather lead. VGC and GamesRadar+ name Owen Shepherd, Rockstar's vice president of art for lighting and rendering (Kotaku spells it Shepard). VGC quotes him saying the team "re-engineered our weather system" to be more localized and persistent, with skies ranging from a clear Miami winter to the summer and autumn thunderheads. GamesRadar+ says the system was overhauled from Red Dead Redemption 2's.
• Hurricanes up close. Kotaku quotes Shepherd describing heavy clouds, strong winds and rain, water gushing off roof edges and lampposts, and lightning lighting up the clouds.
• Wind. Also per Kotaku: offshore breezes after sunset, updrafts, wind blocked by buildings, hair and debris swirling on rooftops, and gusts that ripple water and "bend the grass in swamps."
• The animal count, broken down. VGC writes "60 types of birds, 30 land mammals," plus sharks, whales and jellyfish. Kotaku and Dexerto both say "over" or "more than" 60 birds and 30-plus land mammals. Kotaku adds monkeys and armadillos. Dexerto adds whales, turtles and jellyfish.
• Why so many. Dexerto quotes Rockstar vice president of dynamic art Michael Kane: Florida "has a diverse animal ecosystem" the team wanted across Leonida's biomes, from cities to swamps.
• Fur that reacts. Kotaku reports fur will react to "human-to-animal interaction," with dirt matting and clumping when wet.
• Places to see animals. VGC lists zoos, airboating, scuba diving and kayaking among the game's activities, from the same cover story.

One caution: Kotaku's article lists PC among the platforms. No PC version has been announced (see our PC release tracker), so we did not take platform details from it.

Every animal and weather effect, with its source

What is still unknown

• The rare animals. Nobody has named a Legendary animal. Any list you see now is a guess.
• Hurricane frequency. Game Informer says outright that it does not know how often big storms happen or what they do to missions.
• Hunting rules. Rockstar promises "prime hunting" in Mount Kalaga, and its images show armed people posing with a dead alligator in the Grassrivers. How hunting works has not been described on a Rockstar page.
• The full magazine text. We read Game Informer's free articles and outlets' quotes of the issue, not the print story itself.

For how all this fits with the rest of the game's systems, see GTA 6 gameplay features. For where each region sits, see the GTA 6 map, Leonida, and the real Florida places outlets have matched them to on our real life locations page.

Trivia

• Game Informer felt the need to add, in parentheses, that Florida really does have monkeys.
• Rockstar's Goodtime State has its own cartoon gator, Macca the Gator, a "hit TV show character" who appears on the Ultimate Edition's Goodtime Gear hats and shirts, per Rockstar's Only in Leonida page.
• Game Informer's May 2025 regions roundup already spotted sea turtles in the Keys screenshots, more than a year before the species count came out.

Sources and method

Confirmed rows come from Rockstar's own pages, read on Oct 14 2026, and from Rockstar's Trailer 1 as described by PC Gamer. Report rows come from Game Informer's free articles and from VGC, Kotaku, Dexerto and GamesRadar+ articles quoting the cover story, all opened on Oct 14 2026. Where outlets give different numbers, both are shown. No leaks, leak-based lists or search summaries were used.

• Rockstar Games, Only in Leonida
• Rockstar Newswire, In-Game Radio Stations, Oct 8 2026
• PC Gamer, Trailer 1 scene-by-scene, Dec 5 2023
• Game Informer, Over 170 Animal Species, Sep 29 2026
• Game Informer, Tropical Storms And Hurricanes, Sep 29 2026
• Game Informer, Cover Reveal, Sep 25 2026
• VGC, map, hurricanes and tropical storms, Sep 29 2026
• Kotaku, 170 species and hurricanes, Sep 29 2026
• Dexerto, 170 animals including Legendary ones, Sep 29 2026
• GamesRadar+, weather re-engineered, Sep 30 2026
• Game Informer, Six Major Areas, May 6 2025
• GTA VI Forum fact base (FACTS.md), compiled Oct 11 2026