A Salamander of Legend Emerges From Southern Swamps
Source: New York Times
A Salamander of Legend Emerges From Southern Swamps
The reticulated siren is the largest vertebrate discovered in the United States in decades.
By Asher Elbein
Dec. 14, 2018
It’s eel-shaped and leopard-spotted, and it has no hind-limbs. It grows to two feet long. And yet until recently, hardly anyone had ever seen it.
A team of researchers has discovered of new species of salamander in the pine forests of northern Florida and southern Alabama. The so-called reticulated siren is the largest vertebrate found in the United States in decades, and the first new member of its family since 1944.
“It’s a really cool animal,” said David Steen, a conservation biologist at the Georgia Sea Turtle Center and an author of a genetic analysis of the salamander published in PLOS One. The salamander’s distinctive patterning “jumps out immediately,” he said.
Known for their size and bushy gills, sirens are a fixture in Southeastern swamps and watery ditches. Previously, Dr. Steen said, the genus was assumed to contain only two species: the lesser siren and greater siren, which can grow to three feet in length, one of the longest American salamanders.
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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/science/salamander-reticulated-siren.html
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Related: Description of an extant salamander from the Gulf Coastal Plain of North America: The Reticulated Siren, Siren reticulata (PLOS One)
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This was taken last February at the Circle B Bar Reserve just south of Lakeland, Florida. I also sent it to the author of the paper about the reticulated siren and he thinks this one was a greater siren. I just know that the great blue heron had a lot of trouble swallowing the creature and took several attempts with a few beating of the siren in between.
