Category Archives: amphibians

Episode 054: Regenerating Animals

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This week we’re going to learn about animals that can regenerate parts of their body. What animals can do it, how does it work, and can humans figure out how to make it work for us too?

Thanks to Maxwell of the awesome Relic: The Lost Treasure podcast for suggesting this week’s topic!

The planarian, not exciting to look at but you can get a lot of them easily:

A starfish leg growing a new starfish, or possibly a slightly gross magic wand. Ping! You’ve been turned into a magical starfish:

The adorable axolotl:

The almost as adorable African spiny mouse:

A hydra. Not really very adorable except possibly to other hydras but kind of pretty:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week’s episode was going to be about lungfish, but I had to postpone it because I ran across some conflicting information about a mystery lungfish, which required me to order a book that probably won’t arrive for a week or two. So when I tweeted about needing a new topic quick, Maxwell of the Relic: The Lost Treasure podcast suggested animals that can regenerate parts of their bodies.

We’ve touched on regenerative abilities before in one or two episodes. Some lizards can drop their tail if threatened, which then regrows later—but a lizard can only do that once. The fish-scaled gecko from episode 20 can lose its scales and regenerate them repeatedly. But other animals can regenerate not just bits and pieces, but entire organs and even their brains. The sea lamprey can even regenerate spinal cord cells. You better believe researchers are trying to figure out how regeneration works and if it can be adapted for human application.

A lot of worms can regenerate lost pieces, including earthworms. Whenever I’m gardening and accidentally cut an earthworm in half with the shovel, I reassure myself that the worm will regenerate the end I cut off. Some species can even grow back from both cut pieces, effectively turning one earthworm into two, depending on where it is severed, although that’s rare. Some species of worm can only regrow the tail, but some can regrow the head. And some, of course, can’t regrow anything. Leeches are a type of worm but they can’t regenerate at all.

Planarians are flatworms. Some species live in water, some in damp areas on land, but they can all regenerate. If you cut a planarian in two, each half will regenerate into a new planarian. If you cut a planarian in three, you’ll get three planarians. Cut one into four, you get four planarians, and so on and on. Researchers with a lot of time and patience have determined that you can cut a planarian into as many as 277 pieces and you will get 277 planarians after a few weeks. But I guess if you cut a planarian into 278 or more pieces, some of the extra pieces won’t do anything.

Starfish are well-known to regenerate lost or injured legs, and may even drop a leg to escape from predators the way some lizards drop their tails. Some species of starfish can regrow an entire starfish from a single limb. That’s oddly creepy. I don’t know why I find it so creepy. I don’t find the planarians creepy. It’s like if I was run over by a motorboat that chopped my arms and legs off, and instead of dying I not only regrew my arms and legs, my severed arms and legs each grew a new me. I don’t think I’d like that. Although I’m not going to get in the water so I doubt I’ll be run over by a motorboat, and also if I was, sharks would probably eat me before we could see if any parts regrew.

Many starfish relations, such as sea urchins and sea cucumbers, can also regenerate body parts. When the sea cucumber is threatened, it can and will eject its internal organs. They’re sticky and full of toxins, which deters predators, and the sea cucumber just regenerates them.

Most crustaceans, such as crabs and krill, can regenerate legs. So can spiders, which may drop legs to escape from predators. That’s called autotomy, by the way, when an animal detaches a body part to escape from a predator. Spiders molt their exoskeletons every so often as they grow, and lost limbs grow back after molting. Sometimes it takes a few molts for the leg to be the same size as the other legs. Spiders can also regenerate other lost or damaged parts, including mouthparts and spinnerets.

Salamanders and newts can regenerate limbs, tail, some organs, jaws, even parts of their eyes. Frogs and other amphibians can’t. Likewise, some fish can regenerate injured tissue, such as the zebrafish which can regrow fins and eye retinas, and some species of sharks that can regenerate skin tissue, while others can’t. The axolotl, which is an adorable rare salamander found in Mexico, can regrow just about any part of its body, including its spinal cord and up to half of its brain.

So what about mammals? Do any mammals have regenerative capabilities? As a matter of fact, yes. The African spiny mouse is the big regenerator among mammals. It’s actually more closely related to gerbils, and it has stiff guard hairs all over its body that stick out and make it look fuzzy but which act as spines to help ward off predators. But if a predator attacks anyway, three species of the spiny mouse can autotomically drop off part of its skin, which later grows back. Some species of spiny mouse are kept as pets, even though they don’t do very well in captivity. The pet species don’t have regeneration abilities, incidentally. However, they do have delicate tails that are easily injured, which they then lose, and the tail does not grow back.

Those three species of African spiny mouse can also regenerate ear tissue. If a spiny mouse’s ear is damaged, even if it has a hole as big as four mm across, it can regenerate the ear as good as new rather than heal it with scar tissue. A number of mammals can regenerate small injuries to ear cartilage under the right circumstances, including cats. Rabbits can also regrow damaged ear tissue, and have some other regenerative abilities too.

It’s all well and good to point out that a whole lot of animals can regenerate lost or damaged body parts. But how does it work? And more to the point, why can’t humans do it?

Technically, humans and other animals are regenerating certain cells all the time, especially skin cells and blood cells. Small cuts and scrapes heal up without scarring and we don’t think about it at all. Fingertips will grow back after injury and the liver can regenerate. The endometrium, which is the lining of the uterus, is partially reabsorbed into the body and partially expelled from the body every month during menstruation, then regrows. Toenails and fingernails regrow after injury. We just don’t think about all these things because they seem normal to us, whereas we can’t regrow a whole finger if it’s been chopped off, for instance.

I won’t go too deeply into how regeneration works, mostly because it’s complicated and I don’t want to screw it up too badly. There are also different types of regenerative abilities with different processes. Basically, though, as an example, when a salamander loses a leg, the cells surrounding the wound dedifferentiate, basically turning from regular skin cells or what have you into stem cells that can grow into anything the body needs. These cells form what’s called a blastema, which is just the fancy name for a bundle of dedifferentiated cells. Then the blastemal cells start differentiating again, this time into the cells needed to regrow the leg, just as stem cells grew legs when the salamander was developing in its egg.

It sounds pretty simple, put like that. I mean, that’s how we all develop in the first place, from a fertilized egg into a person who can make podcasts and eat cupcakes. The main problem is figuring out how to get human cells to dedifferentiate into a blastema. Because it’s not just injuries that could be helped if scientists figure this out, it’s all sorts of problems. People who have lost their sight due to retinal diseases could regrow new retinas. People born with birth defects could have the nonstandard parts regrown so that they work the way they’re supposed to.

Researchers are working hard to figure all this out. Stem cell research is a big part of regenerative research. Unfortunately, at some point the rumor started that all stem cells come from babies, specifically embryonic stem cells. When a human egg is fertilized, after a couple of days a blastocyst is formed from the cells, which is similar to a blastema but made of cells that have never differentiated into anything else. They’re brand new cells with the capacity to make a brand new human. Naturally, people are squiffy about taking cells that might make a baby and using them for something else. But amniotic fluid, the fluid that surrounds the baby as it’s growing in its mother, also contains stem cells, and they can be harvested without hurting the baby or the mother. You can also get stem cells from the umbilical cord right after a baby is born, and the umbilical cord is just cut off and thrown away anyway so you might as well give it a little extra use. But most stem cells used in research and treatment these days come from bone marrow, lipid cells in fat tissue, and blood, all of which can be extracted without harming the person. They’re not as powerful as embryonic and amniotic stem cells, but they have the benefit of being from the patient’s own body, so no immunosuppression is required to make sure the body accepts them in stem cell treatment.

That was a lot of confusing medical information, so let’s talk about one more animal that can regenerate, the hydra. We’ve talked about the hydra before in the jellyfish episode, which for a long time was our most popular episode. It’s now our second-most downloaded episode, with our first episode inexplicably in the top spot. The hydra is a freshwater animal related to jellies that can regenerate so completely it’s essentially immortal.

The hydra is related to the so-called immortal jellyfish we talked about in episode 19. It can regenerate just about any injury, and like the planarian it can regenerate into more than one copy of itself if it’s cut up into tiny pieces. It’s only a few millimeters long but its tiny body is full of stem cells, and as long as stem cells are present in the body part that was cut off, an entirely new hydra can grow from it. Because of its amazing regenerative abilities, some admittedly controversial studies suggest the hydra doesn’t age. That’s a neat trick, if you can manage it.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 046: The Other Loch Ness Monsters

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There’s more in Loch Ness than one big mystery animal. This week we look at a few smaller mystery animals lurking in the cold depths of the lake.

Further reading:

Here’s Nessie: A Monstrous Compendium from Loch Ness by Karl P.N. Shuker

The goliath frog:

The Wels catfish (also, River Monsters is the best):

An amphipod:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

Back in episode 29, I dismissed Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, as probably not a real animal. But this week we’re heading back to Loch Ness to see what other monsters might lurk in its murky depths.

WHAAAAA? Other Loch Ness monsters???

Yes, really! See, ever since the first sightings of Nessie in the 1930s, Loch Ness has been studied and examined so closely that it would be more surprising if no one had ever spotted other mystery animals.

The source of most of the information in this episode is from zoologist Karl Shuker’s book Here’s Nessie! A Monstrous Compendium from Loch Ness. Check the show notes for a link if you’re interested in buying your own copy of the book.

Our first non-Nessie mystery dates from 1934, but it happened, supposedly, sometime in the 1880s. It appeared in the Northern Chronicle, an Inverness newspaper, on January 31, 1934. The article relates that a ship in Loch Ness hit a submerged reef called Johnnie’s Point and sank one night. Luckily no one died. The next day a local diving expert named Duncan Macdonald was hired to determine if the wreck could be raised, but he couldn’t spot the wreck during his dive.

Later that evening, some of the ship’s crew who had heard stories about strange creatures living in Loch Ness asked Macdonald whether he’d seen anything unusual. After some urging, Macdonald finally admitted that he had seen a frog-like creature the size of a good-sized goat sitting on a rock ledge some 30 feet, or 9 meters, underwater. It didn’t bother him so he didn’t bother it.

There are a lot of problems with this account, of course. For one thing, we don’t know who wrote it—the article has no byline. It’s also a secondhand account. In fact, the article ends with this line: quote “The story, exactly as given, was told by Mr Donald Fraser, lock-keeper, Fort Augustus, who often heard the diver (his own grand-uncle) tell it many years ago.” unquote

Plus, of course, frogs don’t grow as big as goats. The biggest frog is the goliath frog, which can grow over a foot, or 32 cm, in length nose to tail, or butt I guess since frogs don’t have tails, which is pretty darn big but not anywhere near as big as a goat. The goliath frog also only lives in fast-moving rivers in a few small parts of Africa, not cold, murky lakes in Scotland, and its tadpoles only feed one one type of plant. In other words, even if someone did release a goliath frog into Loch Ness in the 1880s—which is pretty farfetched—it wouldn’t have survived for long.

The biggest frog that ever lived, as far as we know, lived about 65 million years ago and wasn’t all that much bigger than the goliath frog, only 16 inches long, or 41 cm. It had little horns above its eyes, which gives it its name, devil frog. Its descendants, South American horned frogs, also have little horns but are much smaller.

So what might Mr. Macdonald have seen, assuming he didn’t just make it all up? Some species of catfish can grow really big, but catfish aren’t native to Scotland. It’s always possible that a few Wels catfish, native to parts of Europe, were introduced into Loch Ness as a sport fish but didn’t survive long enough to establish a breeding population in the cold waters. Catfish have wide mouths, although their eyes are small, and might be mistaken for a frog if seen head-on in poor light. Plus, the Wels catfish can grow to 16 feet long, or 5 meters.

Then again, since the article was published during the height of the first Loch Ness monster frenzy, it might all have been fabricated from beginning to end.

A 1972 search for Nessie by the same team that announced that famous underwater photograph of a flipper, which later turned out to be mostly painted on, filmed something in the loch that wasn’t just paint. They were small, pale blobs on the grainy film. The team called them bumblebees from their shape.

Then in July of 1981, a different company searching not for Nessie but for a shipwreck from 1952 filmed some strange white creatures at the bottom of the loch. One of the searchers described them as giant white tadpoles, two or three inches long, or about 5 to 7 cm. Another searcher described them as resembling white mice but moving jerkily.

The search for the wreck lasted three weeks and the white mystery animals were spotted more than once, but not frequently. Afterwards, the company sent video of them to Dr. P Humphrey Greenwood, an ichthyologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Since this was the 1980s, of course, the film was videotape, not digital, but Dr. Greenwood got some of the frames computer enhanced. Probably on a computer that had less actual computing power than my phone. Anyway, the enhancement showed that the animals seemed to have three pairs of limbs. Dr. Greenwood tentatively identified them as bottom-dwelling crustaceans, but not ones native to Loch Ness.

Over the years many people have made suggestions as to what these mystery crustaceans might be. I’m going out on a limb here and declaring that they are not baby Loch Ness monsters. Karl Shuker suggests the white mice footage, at least, might be some kind of amphipod.

We’ve met amphipods before in a couple of episodes, mostly because some species exhibit deep-sea gigantism. Amphipods are shrimp-like crustaceans that live throughout the world in both the ocean and fresh water, and most species are quite small. While they do have more than three pairs of legs—eight pairs, in fact, plus two pairs of antennae—the 1981 videotape wasn’t of high quality and details might easily have been lost. Some of the almost 10,000 known species of amphipod are white or pale in color and grow to the right size to be the ones filmed in Loch Ness. But no amphipods of that description have ever been caught in Loch Ness.

New amphipods are discovered all the time, of course. They’re simply everywhere, and the smallest species are only a millimeter long. But because they’re so common, it’s also easy to transport them from one body of water to another. A rare amphipod discovered in Alpine lakes only a few years ago is already threatened by a different, more common species of amphipod introduced to one of the lakes by accident. So it’s possible that the white mice crustaceans in Loch Ness traveled there on someone’s boat.

That’s certainly the case with another creature found in Loch Ness in 1981, but we know exactly what this one is. It’s a flatworm native to North America, a bit over an inch long, or 3 cm, and only about 5 millimeters wide. It attaches its cocoons to boat bottoms, and in this case it was brought to Loch Ness by equipment used to hunt for Nessie. Spoiler alert: they didn’t find her.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.com. We’re on Twitter at strangebeasties and have a facebook page at facebook.com/strangeanimalspodcast. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. If you like the podcast and want to help us out, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or whatever platform you listen on. We also have a Patreon if you’d like to support us that way.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 014: Giant Salamanders

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In episode 14, we discuss the big three of giant salamanders–and some possible mystery relatives.

The Chinese giant salamander. An orange one. Enormous. Mostly harmless. Just wants to eat a snail.

The Japanese giant salamander:

The HELLBENDER reverb reverb reverb

The Pacific giant salamander. Not as giant but has an angry:

Show transcript:

Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.

This week we’re looking at giant salamanders. Yup.

Salamanders are amphibians. Think “wet lizards” or “skinny frogs with tails.” A lot of people think snakes are slimy, but they’re not. Snakes are reptiles and their scales are satiny smooth and dry. Amphibians don’t have scales and they do have slimy skin, which they need to keep moist.

Some salamanders are completely aquatic but most live at least part of their lives on land, usually in wet areas. When I was a kid, I used to like turning over rocks in the creek behind our house, because frequently I’d find a salamander underneath. I wouldn’t catch it, just look at it, which is what you should do if you find a salamander—partly because it’s not good to disturb a wild animal that’s just trying to live its life, and partly because salamanders secrete toxins through their skins. The toxins won’t kill you, but if you get any in your eyes or mouth you could be in for some unpleasant symptoms.

There are two species of salamander known to be venomous, in a way, but they don’t inject venom with special fangs. When the sharp-ribbed salamander is attacked, it pushes its pointed ribs through tubercules along its sides. The tubercules secrete toxins that coat the rib points, which then pierce right through the salamander’s skin and into its attacker.

There are hundreds of salamander species throughout the world, some of them tiny, most of them a few inches long [about 5 or 6 cm], but there are three that are much bigger than that. The biggest is the Chinese giant salamander. The biggest ever found was just shy of six feet long [two meters]. Six feet long! The closely related Japanese giant salamander is almost as big, some five feet long [1.5 meters].

There’s a third giant salamander right here in the southeastern United States where I live, and while at two and a half feet long [76 cm] it’s not nearly as long as its cousins, it has a much better name. The Chinese giant salamander’s local name is infant fish, because some of the sounds it makes remind people of babies crying, which is creepy as heck. The Japanese giant salamander is called the giant pepper fish, because when it’s disturbed it secretes a whitish mucus that smells like pepper. But the North American giant salamander? We call that thing the H E L L B E N D E R.

I did try to find audio of the Chinese giant salamander crying. I had no luck, which is probably a good thing actually, because it’s a distress call. I did find this awesome audio of a Pacific giant salamander. Despite the name giant in its name, it’s not very big compared to the other giants, only about a foot long at most [30 cm], but it does have a cute vocalization.

[Pacific giant salamander call]

(He’s so mad.)

The Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders are so closely related that they readily interbreed. We know that because some fool decided to introduce some Chinese salamanders into streams in Japan. Hellbenders are not as closely related to the Asian salamanders.

All three of the giant salamanders are endangered, mostly due to habitat loss and pollution. They like clean, swift-moving mountain streams with rocks of just the right size—not too big, not too small. But the Chinese salamanders are also considered a delicacy, so they’ve been overhunted as well. Poaching is a major issue, ironically to stock salamander farms. The adults breed readily in captivity, but farmers haven’t had much success getting captive-born individuals to breed, so they continue to capture adults from the wild.

Giant salamanders are fully aquatic, although they can and do get out of the water occasionally for short periods. All three have thick folds of skin along their sides, which increases their surface area, and that’s important because they breathe through their skins. Larval giant salamanders have gills, but when they mature they lose those gills. The hellbender may retain a gill slit but it no longer functions.

While giant salamanders do have a single lung, they don’t use it to breathe. They use it for buoyancy. They like fast-moving water because it’s well oxygenated. A salamander will also rock gently to increase the amount of water moving over its skin, and male salamanders will wave fresh water over their eggs. Males dig and defend the nests. In Japan, they’re called den-masters.

Giant salamanders are flattish in shape with broad bodies and wide heads. Their feet have stubby little toes. They eat fish, snails, crawdads, worms, insects, small mammals, snakes, frogs—basically anything they can catch. They snap up prey fast, sucking it in my creating a vacuum when they open their huge mouths. They range in color from slate gray to black to brownish with dapples. Occasionally an orangish or pink individual is discovered.

All the giant salamanders have poor eyesight, but they have a good sense of smell. In addition, the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders have sensory cells along the sides of their bodies that detect vibrations in the water. The hellbender doesn’t have that kind of sensory cells as far as I’ve been able to find out, but it does have light sensitive cells on its body, especially the tail. This lets it know when its tail is safely hidden, rather than sticking out from under a rock.

Larval hellbenders look a lot like another large salamander in the area, called the mudpuppy or water dog. The mudpuppy can grow a bit over a foot in length [31 cm], but it retains its gills throughout its life. Don’t be fooled by fake hellbenders.

So those are the three giant salamanders in the world, but there are rumors of other giants in the streams and rivers of California. In the 1920s, an attorney named Frank L. Griffith, who was hunting in the area, spotted five salamanders in a lake in the Trinity Alps in northern California. The salamanders ranged in size between five and nine feet long [1.5 and 2.7 m]. He hooked one with a line, but he wasn’t strong enough to land it and it escaped. In the 1940s, animal handler Vern Harden claimed he’d seen eight-foot [2.4 m] salamanders in Hubbard Lake.

Thomas L. Rodgers, a biologist at Chico State College, conducted four expeditions to the Trinity Alps in 1948 in search of the giant. The expeditions didn’t find anything bigger than foot-long [30 cm] Pacific giant salamanders, but Rodgers suggested that the Trinity Alps giant might be a subspecies of the Pacific giant that grows to an enormous size, or might be a cryptobranchid like the eastern hellbender or the Asian giant salamanders.

In 1951, herpetologist George S. Myers published a paper about his own sighting. He said that in 1939 he was contacted by a commercial fisherman who had dredged up a two and a half foot [76 m] salamander in a catfish net from the Sacramento River. Myers described the salamander as dark brown with dull yellow spots, and said that it resembled the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders but appeared to be a different species.

In 1960, Bigfoot hunter Tom Slick convinced an expedition looking for Bigfoot to hunt for the salamander too, with no luck. Also in 1960, Tom Rogers mounted another expedition, this time with some zoology professors and ten interested laymen. Again, they only found the foot-long Pacific giant salamander.

Rodgers decided he was wrong about the existence of a new giant salamander, and in 1962 denounced the previous sightings as misidentifications and hoaxes. More recently, a 1997 expedition led by Japanese-American writer Kyle Mizokami likewise came up with no sightings.

It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a giant salamander lives in the Trinity Alps and just hasn’t been found. It’s the right climate with the right conditions. And new salamanders are occasionally discovered in the United States. In 2009, a new species of lungless salamander was discovered in the Appalachian foothills. Yeah, that’s near where I live!

But that one is barely an inch long [2.5 cm]. It should be a little easier to spot a salamander longer than a grown man is tall, not to mention that two of the Trinity Alps giant salamander sightings report salamanders in lakes. If they’re cryptobranchids, they need running water to survive—streams or shallow rivers.

And as for the third sightings, the one where George Myers actually got a first-hand look at a giant salamander caught in the Sacramento River, there’s more to the story. Tom Rogers, the biologist who led five different expeditions to search for the salamander, also saw the Sacramento specimen. The fisherman had managed to keep it alive in his bathtub. Rogers identified it as a Chinese giant salamander, and in fact it turned out to be a lost pet named Benny that had escaped while being taken to Stockton Harbor by steamer.

If these were the only sightings of giant salamanders in North America that aren’t hellbenders, it wouldn’t be looking good for them. But we’re definitely not done. In his blog, zoologist Karl Shuker reports hearing from a woman who sighted a huge salamander in Redwood Park in Arcata, California in 2005. She described it as several feet long [1 meter] with a rounded head instead of flat like known giant salamanders, no skin folds along its sides, and reddish markings. She spotted it walking on land after a rain. Shuker suggests she might have seen an unusually large coastal giant salamander, which can reach almost a foot and a half in length [45 cm] and which she said her salamander resembled in many respects. Remember that Pacific giant salamander sound I played earlier? The coastal giant salamander is a type of Pacific giant salamander.

California isn’t the only state with a mystery giant salamander, though. Three other states have interesting reports, and all of them are pink.

Pink salamanders actually aren’t all that uncommon. Alibinism in salamanders is well known and not rare, and they frequently look pink due to blood vessels visible through their unpigmented skin.

In the early 1960s, biology student Mary Lou Richardson was bowhunting along Florida’s St. Johns River with her father and a friend. All three saw an animal the size of a donkey with a big flat head and a small neck. Other tourists saw the animal that same day, and local fishermen were familiar with it going back to 1955. It’s not clear from the description if the animal was a salamander or something else.

Then, on May 10, 1975, five people on a fishing trip on the St. Johns River saw a weird pink animal’s head and neck on the water. It was only 20 feet [6 m] from their boat and watched them for about eight seconds before diving again. One witness, Dorothy Abram, described it as having a head the size of a human’s with small horns like a snail’s. Another witness, Brenda Langley, also noted it had “this little jagged thing going down its back.” Presumably she meant serrations of some kind. The party also said the animal had large dark eyes and gills or gill-like flaps on either side of its head.

In Ohio, the first white settlers near Scippo Creek, called Catlick Creek Valley at the time, discovered what they called giant pink lizards living in the area. They were three to seven feet long [1 to 2.1 m] and lived in and around water. They also had moose-like horns, pretty big ones apparently. But after a drought followed by a devastating wildfire, by 1820 the pink lizards seemed to have died out.

And in South Carolina around 1928, nature writer Herbert Sass and his wife were boating on Goose Creek near Charleston when Sass saw something big under the water. He lifted it with an oar and although it almost immediately slipped back into the water, they were able to get a good look. Their description sounds a lot like a hellbender or other giant salamander, in this case as thick around as a man’s thigh and five or six feet long [1.5 to 2 m]. It was salmon pink and orange.

The St. Johns River monster might have been a manatee. The area where it was spotted is a manatee refuge and manatees have been responsible for other mystery animal sightings in the past. Then again, manatees don’t have snail horns, serrated backs, or gills, and known giant salamanders don’t either. It’s important to note too that in the 1975 sighting of the monster, dubbed Pinky because of course it was, witnesses described it as being dinosaur-like and said the skin appeared to be stretched so tightly over its head that the shape of the bones were visible. That doesn’t sound like either a manatee or a salamander, more like a reptile of some kind.

The Ohio and South Carolina sightings are much more interesting in regards to giant salamander sightings. Ohio is historically part of the hellbender’s range, and a population of hellbenders have recently been reintroduced there. Shuker suggests the horns described on the so-called pink lizards might actually have been branching external gills seen underwater. Most species of salamander lose their gills after they grow out of their larval stage, but not all, including mudpuppies. Mudpuppies aren’t as big as hellbenders, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t once a variety that grew much larger.

South Carolina is also part of the hellbender’s range, and Sass’s pink and orange animal might very well have been an exceptional large specimen. Sass himself called it a hellbender.

Even if none of these mystery salamanders are ever discovered, or if they turn out to be known animals, we still have hellbenders around, and the Chinese and Japanese giant salamanders too. The best thing we can do is keep their habitats as pristine as possible, since salamanders need clean streams to thrive. Next time you go hiking, pick up any trash you find and pack it out with you. The salamanders will thank you.

You can find Strange Animals Podcast online at strangeanimalspodcast.blubrry.net. That’s blueberry without any E’s. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for future episodes, email us at strangeanimalspodcast@gmail.com. We also have a Patreon at patreon.com/strangeanimalspodcast if you’d like to support us and get twice-monthly bonus episodes for as little as one dollar a month.

Thanks for listening!