Wildlife ecologist David Steen first heard the rumors of a giant salamander species while he was a graduate student at Auburn University in Alabama back in 2007.
There had long been lore of an unknown amphibian in the waters of Alabama and locals referred to the possible creature as a “leopard eel.” A natural history book titled The Reptiles and Amphibians of Alabama published in 1975 also made mention of it, but no one had been able to prove its existence and eventually people stopped looking.
But Steen and his fellow graduate student Sean Graham had seen preserved specimens in the University’s Museum of Natural History and felt that the labels that identified them as another type of large salamander were wrong. His Ph.D. advisor agreed:
“He said it’s probably a new species just waiting for someone to describe it.”
And that’s exactly what it was.
Steen and Graham dreamt of being the first to identify the new species and they set out on an adventure that would pay off in the discovery of a new species that’s one of the largest animals to be discovered in the U.S. in the past 100 years.
While the museum samples came with data that gave them some indication of where to start looking, it took 2 years to find the first specimen in 2009 while Steen was studying water snakes and turtles at Eglin Air Force Base in Okaloosa County, Florida.
Steen and Graham finally found three more in June 2014 near Lake Jackson in Walton County, Florida. Because their research wasn’t funded, they did this work on their own time and so it took years to prove that their find was unique.
But eventually, they got it done and just recently published their findings in PLOS ONE, an open-access scientific journal that anyone can read.
They named the new salamander species a reticulated siren (S. reticulata).
In the paper, they explain that it lives in both northwest Florida and southern Alabama. It’s described as having a slimy body with an eel-like shape and irregular spots on its skin. It has two forelegs, but no back legs, and sports a set of gills behind its head.
And as soon as the paper was published, the story took off. The new creature had its own Wikipedia page within days and Steen has marveled over the number of stories written about the find in less than a week.
“It was surreal to see after years of talking about this creature — it was kind of a mystical, mythical beast,” Steen says. “It’s so unlike most other creatures that we share the planet with.”
While genetic analysis proves that it’s a unique species, we still know very little about its history.
“We could wait another 10, 20, 30 years to figure out all the details about the species but we felt it was important to document it. Maybe that will provide some incentives for people to do formal studies and surveys. As you know, you can’t afford formal protections to a species that people don’t even know about or don’t even recognize.”
While we don’t know how many of these amphibians are out there, it’s likely that they’re pretty rare since sightings have been few and far between. This could have implications for its conservation status.
Its habitat in the U.S. Southwest is increasingly at risk due to growing human populations, development, logging, and climate change.
The paper will go a long way towards protecting the new species – after all, you can’t protect something you haven’t officially defined.
If you want to know more about Steen’s research, you can follow him on Twitter where he does a lot of science communication. He’s now an ecologist at the George Sea Turtle Center and executive director of The Alongside Wildlife Foundation.
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