Salamander search party

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Andy Glusenkamp is kind of like a detective for animals.

So basically, if it's creepy, crawly, slimy, or has scales, especially if it lives underground, yeah, I'm kind of interested.

Andy's a herpetologist, which means he studies reptiles and amphibians.

He works at the San Antonio Zoo, and for the last 20 years, he's been working on a case, searching for a missing creature.

It's my white whale.

It's actually a white salamander, a blind one called the Blanco blind salamander.

If you asked herpetologists, most of them have heard of it.

It's one of the most famous amphibians that no one's ever seen.

Except for one time, 71 years ago, and then never again.

During the early 1950s, Texas suffered the worst drought in Texas history.

It was called the drought of record, and it's the drought that we compare all other droughts to.

And a lot of major springs went dry.

A gravel company was looking for water, and so they tore up some ground near a natural spring in San Marcos, a city between San Antonio and Austin.

They basically dug a big trench along this water-filled crevice, hoping that they could get to some pocket of water.

And at the bottom of the trench were some of the weirdest creatures these workers had ever seen.

These four pale white salamanders with no eyes.

They looked like they were from another world.

And so the foreman at the time had the foresight to gather up a few in a bucket.

The crew went to lunch, but while they were gone, a heron, which are super common there, ate almost all the salamanders.

So there were two left.

One salamander went to Texas State University and it was immediately lost.

And then there was one.

And the other specimen actually rolled around in my predecessor's trunk for a number of years before he was finally convinced to deposit it in the University of Texas at Austin's collections.

No one has seen another live one since.

The salamander that was sent to UTASIN is the only specimen on the planet.

It's not alive, but it's preserved.

And they have this warehouse that's just filled with all kinds of specimens, all kinds of reptiles and amphibians.

And then there is this jar with the salamander in it.

Box science reporter Benji Jones.

It was in a, it looked, looked, I mean, it could have been a pickle jar.

It was in just like a glass jar with a label on it.

And the jar is 70% ethanol.

You open the lid, it smells a little bit like vodka.

And then it's just kind of floating on the bottom.

A dead preserved salamander isn't exactly glamorous.

It looks like about like a three inch long,

pale,

no color, no eyes, just like hunk of flesh.

And it was like furrowed, like very wrinkly and hard as well.

And that's just because it's literally so old.

And so, yeah, it kind of looks like a 70-year-old salamander.

Benji wasn't impressed by what he saw in front of him, but the mystery of the Blanco Blind salamander captured his imagination.

It's just a really intriguing idea because I love like murder mysteries, and then I think about animals that have gone missing as well.

And I think there are just a lot of interesting questions you can answer in looking for them and understanding how they even went missing at all, given that the world is so explored.

You may have heard of categories like endangered or threatened.

These are animals that are at risk of extinction.

But there's this whole other category, lost species, species that have gone missing.

They could be extinct, they could be at risk of extinction, and we're just not sure because we haven't seen them for at least 10 years.

And by some definitions, lost means no one has seen them for at least 50 years.

But if something hasn't been seen in such a long time, how do we know it's not extinct?

To prove an animal is extinct is actually really difficult.

It requires that you do exhaustive searches across all the potential habitat that it could live in and prove that it does not exist there.

So it's really, it's a really severe thing to say that something is extinct.

A lost species is more like a big question mark.

It's missing, but there's not enough information to say that it's gone for good.

And scientists all around the world have been looking for these lost species.

There's this broader need to understand and take stock of what lives on this planet, both because it's like really cool to know what we live with and like what we share our world with, but also I would say one thing I hear a lot from researchers is that you can't protect what you don't know exists.

There is some hope though.

Hundreds of species have been found after disappearing for decades.

The Jackson's climbing salamander was rediscovered in Guatemala in 2017, and in 2019, the chevrotain, which is this animal the size of a big rabbit that somehow also looks like a deer, that was rediscovered in Vietnam.

Finding these lost species might be the only way to help them avoid extinction, because when they're found, we can take action.

There are also limited amounts of resources to protect species, and they'll often go towards the animals that are at risk of extinction.

And so, we need to know what those animals are.

People like Andy have been searching for them.

And so far, Andy's only lead is that sole-preserved specimen of the Blanco-blind salamander, this dry, jerky-looking, vodka-drenched hunk in a jar.

But even though no one has seen a live one for decades, Andy is convinced it's still out there.

Rather than riding that species off and saying, well, it must be extinct because no one's seen it since 1951, I think we really need to focus on looking for it.

No one's actually looked for it.

I'm Manding Wynn, and this is Unexplainable.

On this week's show, Benji and I go to Texas to join the search for the missing salamander and to try and answer an even bigger question: How do species go missing?

And if they do, how do we find them?

Holy hell, it's hot.

Oh my god.

90 to 95 degrees.

As with any detective case, we start our investigation around where the salamander was last seen.

This is the portal, one of these extremely rare portals.

This one's too hot to lift.

It's heavy.

Can I help you?

Yeah, sure.

Let's slide it sideways.

The last time anyone saw a live Blanco blind salamander, it was near a natural spring that connects to a huge underground world of watery caverns, lakes, and streams that can reach more than a thousand feet deep and that stretches for thousands of miles under south central Texas.

This is the world of the Blanco Blind salamander, the Edwards Aquifer.

Oh, wow.

So there is water down there.

90 feet down.

Echo.

And this is how deep?

360.

360 feet.

All we can see is a smooth pool of water that dips into black.

I'll walk up to one of these and be totally unimpressed till I look down it, and then I get, you know, dizzy.

The mind starts to reel just thinking about what's going on down there.

Staring into the well, I try to imagine what's going on deep beneath the surface.

The Edwards Aquifer is one of the most biodiverse aquifers in the world, right in the middle of Texas.

The creatures that call this aquifer home have been evolving in isolation for tens of millions of years, and many of them aren't found anywhere else in the world.

There are blind catfish, countless tiny invertebrates, a lot of creatures which never needed to evolve eyes in the perpetual darkness.

But despite how huge this aquifer is, most of it is pretty hard to access.

There's big water, but a lot of the water moves in the aquifer is moving through essentially Swiss cheese.

Most of the the aquifer is packed with layers of sediment, with openings just big enough for water and small creatures to slip through.

It's more like a very large area of porous rock than a giant underground ocean.

And hidden in this world somewhere, we think, is the Blanco Blind salamander.

Imagine trying to like search for a hair tie in a warehouse of Olympic-sized pools using a bucket in the dark.

Like it just, it is very difficult to try to find this thing.

Andy has been looking for over 20 years, but hasn't found a single one.

A big problem for him has been access.

Well, in the area around the discovery site, there aren't

accessible portals to the aquifer.

There aren't many.

Most of Texas is private land.

And Andy's found that landowners don't really like biologists coming onto their land and digging into their water sources trying to catch salamanders.

Thankfully, he doesn't need to catch the blunk of blind salamander itself to know it's out there.

All he needs is a clue.

Is this equipment made for sampling like this?

Yeah.

Andy has this plastic container to sample water, and he throws it into the well.

There we go, we hit water.

So this is like the modern version of dropping a bucket in the well.

Yeah, not that modern.

Andy pulls up some well water and then puts it in a little syringe.

And And then you're going to shoot this through a filter that hopefully will capture the DNA.

Yeah.

It's

0.8 nanometers.

Wow.

And then we push some preservative in, screw the caps on the filter.

And what you're preserving is the DNA.

Yeah.

All living organisms are constantly shedding DNA.

Through our hair, our skin cells, our blood.

Scientists can take these clues, compare them to a large database of animal DNA, and then hope for a match.

It's a process called eDNA sampling.

eDNA is free-floating DNA shed by living organisms.

And it just stands for environmental DNA.

Environmental DNA.

And it could be airborne, soil-borne, or water-borne.

Scientists have been using eDNA to find animals for about a decade now, and it's been a game changer for monitoring wildlife.

eDNA sampling can't tell scientists an animal's age or the population size, but it's been used to detect invasive species and to rediscover lost ones.

But there's one problem.

There's no sequence data available for this species.

The DNA of the original salamander was never preserved.

So even if Andy finds the eDNA he's looking for, he might not know it.

He has no original Blanco blind salamander DNA to compare it to.

So basically, there will never be a positive match with the DNA of the salamander because you don't have the DNA of the salamander.

So you're looking for something close to that that is not

you but not you, so maybe your third cousin.

Andy basically needs to take the eDNA he finds, compare it to the DNA of other living salamanders and other animals in the aquifer, and if it's different in just the right way, it might belong to the Blanco Blind salamander.

It's like trying to figure out where a puzzle piece goes.

You need to put the other pieces in place to see which one is missing and where it fits.

So what what else lives in this aquifer?

What's their world like?

And do we know enough of this puzzle to place this missing salamander?

This amazing world full of undescribed vertebrates that are crazy-looking things.

Well, they don't look at all, they're black, but they're really strange to look at, is literally right below our feet.

We had to get down there ourselves to find out.

All right, guys, ready.

Whoa,

after the break, we go spelunking.

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No, sir!

I ate a salamander and jumped out the window!

My daughter just got accepted to Newtopia University!

Unexplainable, I'm Mandy Nguyen.

We've been following Andy's journey to find the missing Blanco Blind salamander.

Its last known location, the Edwards Aquifer, and the best clue to find it, its DNA.

But finding the Blanco Blind salamander would only be the starting point to unraveling its mysterious life.

It would be wonderful to be able to have some sort of closure on this mystery.

Not just what is it, what are its relationships, where does it live, how is it doing.

It's an extraordinary animal.

If the Blanco Blind salamander were a missing person, we'd be interviewing close friends, family, community members.

Because to know a salamander, you need to know what it's connected to.

And so how long of a drive to the cave from here?

10 minutes.

Sweet.

Benji and I wanted to see the world of the salamanders for ourselves, to know the other pieces that make up the whole.

So Andy took us on a field trip.

We are driving across a private ranch on our way to the entrance of Honey Creek Cave.

The Edwards Aquifer is through this cave.

Are we here?

Yep.

Here's a northern cricket frog, a whole bunch of them.

Wait, where?

That's where.

So we are standing in Honey Creek

and we are looking at the upstream end of the pool

that is formed by water spilling out of the cave and down the spring run into Honey Creek.

Looking downstream at the creek, it's green and pristine blue as far as the eye can see.

There's like beautiful fish swimming under a blanket of lily pads.

The waterfall literally looks like it was sculpted by like Home Depot's garden center.

This is literally the cleanest creek for 75 miles in any direction.

It's an absolute jewel.

Standing at the edge of this creek, listening to the birds and the water flowing, it's hard to imagine that the source of all this is beyond that cave and deep underground.

That crevice that you see right there is the dry entrance.

Oh, it's so nondescript.

Like it's almost hidden.

Yeah, we try and make them that way.

Is that where we're going to be heading in to?

We're going to go in then.

Ooh, so cool.

Immediately cool air.

Oh, wow.

Pitch black already.

We slip into the cave entrance, and the temperature drops dramatically.

There's cool air from deep within the cave system, which always remains at 68 degrees Fahrenheit, no matter what temperature it is outside.

Just sit down and cool down down with your lights off, let your eyes adjust a little.

Whoa.

Are we going in that hole again?

Is that hole?

This big.

All we can see ahead of us is a ledge that leads into still water.

And past that, complete darkness.

Lights on?

Um, well, I don't want to turn on these areas.

We zip up our wetsuits, put on our helmets and snorkels, and turn on our flashlights.

By this point, I've left my audio equipment on dry land, and Benji starts recording with his phone in a waterproof case.

Okay.

Oh, wow, there are spiders everywhere.

Shining our lights on the cave walls, we see a giant mass of spider-like arachnids.

They're stretched across the ceiling of the cave.

They almost look like they're dancing.

Some caves, you look down into the cave, and it looks like just a pulsing beard.

Because virtually the whole entrance is a solid, all the walls are solid mat of those.

Oh my god.

Benji and I are trying not to freak out at the carpet of spider-like creatures on the ceiling.

But Andy's cheery.

It's really fun when you're caving with buddies.

You scoop up a handful of those and shove down the back of someone's shirt.

And they smell like mark-selot pens, you know?

As we walk deeper into the cave, there are fish, frogs, and insects that greet us along the way.

All right, you guys ready?

Oh, this explore is my mask on.

Deep breath.

Whoa.

The ledge drops out beneath us, and we're swimming.

So if you turn clear water, yeah, if you turn right, you come out the spring.

If you turn left, you got a lot of cave.

Right, spring, left, deep into the cave.

Wow.

Andy leads the way.

We can't see anything except what's illuminated by the narrow rays of our flashlights.

We swim and we duck under stalactites that jut out from the ceiling, their points hovering barely a foot above the water.

Everyone good?

It's okay to hold on to you please?

Be very gentle.

Andy scans his flashlight across the bottom of the cave, about 15 feet down, looking for something.

Can you see it?

Yeah, you can see all the way to the bottom.

That's incredible.

He shines his light on a little white blob sitting still on the cave floor.

It's hard to hear him because his phone is literally underwater.

But Benji's yelling, I saw it.

Andy dives down to catch the blob and brings it back up in a little net.

We're bobbing in the cold water, trying to see this little creature.

It's not the Blanco blind salamander.

It's a different one, the Kamal blind salamander.

It's tiny, barely two inches long, and it doesn't have eyes.

It doesn't need them here in the perpetual darkness.

The Kamal blind salamander, like many other creatures in the Edwards Aquifer, is only found here.

13 other species here have been categorized as threatened or endangered, and a lost mosquito fish that was last seen in 1983 in the aquifer was recently listed as extinct.

Finding our missing salamander, the Blanco blind salamander, is about a lot more than just saving one species.

Andy says it could teach us a lot about this underground world.

These salamanders probably have very sensitive skin, which makes them susceptible to pollution.

So if Andy can find one alive, it's a good sign for the health of the aquifer.

But if he can't, it could be a sign of bigger problems, both for the creatures here and the humans who live above it.

The Edwards Aquifer provides drinking water for 2 million people in the region, and urban development above the aquifer is threatening its delicate ecosystem.

So the Blanco Blind Salamander could be like a canary in the coal mine, if we can find it.

Swimming back to the entrance, I can feel the cold deep in my bones and I can't catch my breath.

So we stop to sit on a rock ledge on the way out.

Then, someone suggests that we turn off our lights.

Pure darkness.

All I can hear is our breath and the light splashing of water.

I stop feeling cold.

I don't notice my own short breath.

I can't register anything.

For a moment, I feel myself disappear, dissolving into the dark world of water and salamanders.

Turns out, there's maybe another explanation for what I was feeling.

When we get back to the entrance, Andy says that the cave has bad air.

Limestone releases carbon dioxide, and the cave restricts airflow, so there's literally too much CO2 in there.

I may just have been experiencing low-grade hypoxia.

But still,

I can see why Andy keeps coming back to this world and to the salamander again and again.

To be honest, why am I working on the Blanko Blind salamander?

Because it captured my imagination.

How often do you get the chance to chase a decades-old mystery in an eerie underground world that just happens to be in your backyard?

And this one is a great challenge.

It's been over 70 years since this species has been seen.

There are species and ecosystems disappearing all the time.

It seems like an accelerating rate.

We need to focus on the things that we can make a positive difference.

We've got the resources, the technology.

We can keep this around.

So even though it's missing, there's no reason to write it off.

Writing off a species

is tantamount to burning all the books in the library that you haven't read yet.

My goal is to fill in all those blanks that we need to make sound decisions.

The Blanco Blind Salamanders ecosystem is our ecosystem.

An entire world right under our feet, spilling out and sustaining the world above.

Before Benji and I leave Texas, Andy tells us that we have to go visit the San Marcos River, which is fed by the Edwards Aquifer.

It is just like a perfect summer day.

Oh, everyone's out.

The water looks so lovely.

It is so enticing.

Literally comes out of the aquifer here, which means that the water is pretty clean and you can see it looks like

crystal, crystal clear, make a little bit of a greenish-blue hue.

We stand at the river's edge, and for a moment, we just take in the bright sun, the blue sky, the sparkling water, and all the people enjoying it.

This is really beautiful.

There's literally nothing you can do but get in the water when it's this hot and that is what everyone here is doing.

You think they're gonna find salamanders?

No.

Alright, shall we?

We're gonna get in the water.

Alright, let's see how this feels.

Oh, it is chilly.

Oh my god, it's, I mean, it's incredible.

It is so chilly, but it's exactly what I want to feel right now.

Yay!

This episode was reported by me, Benji Jones, and Mandy Nguyen, who produced this episode.

There was editing from Meredith Hodnott, Catherine Wells, Brian Resnick, and Noam Hassenfeld, who also scored the episode.

Christian Ayala did the mixing and sound design, Richard Seema did the fact-checking, and Bird Pinkerton is off hiking into the woods in search of buried treasure.

If you want to read more about lost species in the missing salamander, check out the story I wrote for Vox.com titled, Why Scientists Are Desperate to Find a Salamander That's Been Missing for 71 Years.

Additional thanks to Barney Long, Devin Murphy, and Lena Valencia at Rewild, Travis Leduc and Adam Cohen at UT Austin, as well as Ben Hutchins, Ben Schwartz, and Scott Nicholson.

If you have thoughts about this episode or ideas for the show, please email us.

We're unexplainable at vox.com.

We'd also love it if you left us a review or a rating.

Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

We're off next week, but we'll be back in your feed on September 14th.

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