Bonus! Reticulated siren discovered!
b'BREAKING NEWS, EVERYONE! A new giant salamander has been discovered, right here in the southern United States! It was only formally described YESTERDAY if you\\u2019re listening to this the night it goes live, assuming I manage to get it finished and uploaded before Friday morning. I should have put this together yesterday but didn\\u2019t think about it until today. Today being Thursday.\\n\\nWe\\u2019re talking about the reticulated siren, also called the leopard eel although it\\u2019s not an eel. It\\u2019s also not a leopard. There are three species of siren alive today, including the reticulated. Reticulated means spotted or mottled, if you were wondering. Sirens look a lot like eels except that instead of fins they have tiny vestigial forelegs and external gills. They have no hind limbs at all.\\n\\nThe greater siren lives in wetlands near the Atlantic coast of North America, specifically in the southern coastal states like Alabama and Florida. It grows over three feet long, or 97 cm, and is usually dark greenish or gray with tiny green or yellow dots along its sides. It eats water insects, mollusks, and occasionally plants. The lesser siren is very similar to the greater siren but doesn\\u2019t grow as big, and lives throughout much of the eastern United States and northeastern Mexico.\\n\\nThe reticulated siren is almost the size of the greater siren, and is gray-green and covered with a maze of spots. Its head is relatively small and its gill branches are large. It\\u2019s only been found in southern Alabama and the Florida panhandle.\\n\\nThe first reticulated sirens known to science were actually caught in the 1970s in Alabama, but although those three specimens were preserved and held in a museum for study, it wasn\\u2019t formally described. Another reticulated siren wasn\\u2019t found until 2009, when a herpetologist, David Steen, caught one while trapping water snakes and turtles in Florida.\\n\\nSteen and biologist Sean Graham worked together to find more. It took them five years to trap three more specimens in a pond in Florida. After lots of study, including DNA analysis, they determined they had found a new species.\\n\\nNow that we know the reticulated siren is a species of its own, researchers like Steen and Graham are working to find out more about it. They suspect it\\u2019s rare since it\\u2019s been so hard to find, and that means it needs to be protected. The wetlands where it lives are constantly in danger of being drained and filled in to make way for houses, Walmarts, parking lots, and other things we should put somewhere else and leave the wetlands alone.\\n\\nSirens are fully aquatic, specifically living in swamps, ponds, and boggy areas with a lot of vegetation they can hide in. If a siren\\u2019s pond dries up, it can burrow into the mud and aestivate in a cocoon of slime and sloughed-off skin, sometimes for a year or two until water returns to the area. But we don\\u2019t yet know if the reticulated siren can do this too.\\n\\nThat\\u2019s it for our breaking news update. We\\u2019ll be back on Monday morning as usual with an episode about strange reptiles.\\n\\nThanks for listening!'