Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is AmMom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Right now, species are going extinct at the fastest rate since when the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago. It's a crisis.
But what about the species that slip through the cracks? The ones where we aren't sure whether they're extinct? The ones that have gone missing? A few years ago, our reporter Manding Nguyen flew down to Texas to look for one of these missing species. She ended up making one of our favorite episodes.
So we wanted to share it again with you because Mandy actually went cave diving and she found this mysterious underwater world hiding beneath one of the biggest cities in the country. Here's Mandy.
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.
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Chapter 2: What species is the focus of the search in this episode?
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 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 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.
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Chapter 3: How did the blanco-blind salamander become a missing species?
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 that moves in the aquifer is moving through essentially Swiss cheese.
Most of 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 blanco-blind salamander itself to know it's out there. All he needs is a clue.
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Chapter 4: What challenges do scientists face in finding lost species?
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 Blanco 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 salamander's 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. 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 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.
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