I want you to imagine that you're outside. It just rained, you can smell it. That clean, wet smell that comes right after a rainstorm. You're standing at the edge of a clear, shallow stream. The water moves slowly over smooth stones, and you can see all the way to the bottom. You crouch down to get a closer look. And then you see something move. Not in the water exactly, at the edge, where the wet bank meets the stream. Something small, low to the ground. Four tiny legs, a long tail, smooth dark skin. It stops. You stop. You both stay completely still for a moment, and then it slips into the water and disappears between two rocks, gone before you could even get a good look. You lean in closer, you wait. There's another one. And another. Once you know what you're looking for, they're everywhere. Now, what if I told you that in one very specific place on Earth? This would happen every single time. Every stream, every wet bank, every mossy boulder. More salamanders than you could ever count, packed into one mountain forest. So many that scientists gave it a nickname. Welcome to National Park Scouts. I'm Jenny, and this is a show where curious kids discover America's wildest places. We are still in the great Smoky Mountains, still finding things most people walk right past. We've found what's making all that smokier. We've gazed in awe at the fireflies, and that brings us to today. Today, we're going underground, underwater, and under every log we can find. Let's go find some salamanders. A lot of people see a salamander and think, lizard. Understandable. Four legs, a tail, moves fast, lives in the woods, but salamanders and lizards are about as different as you can get, while still both having four legs. Lizards are reptiles. They have dry, scaly skin. They lay eggs with leathery shells. They like it warm and sunny. If you've ever seen a lizard basking on a rock in the sun, that's very lizard behavior. Salamanders are amphibians. Their skin is smooth and moist, sometimes slimy. They cannot dry out. They need moisture, shade, cool temperatures, and water nearby. A salamander basking on a warm, dry rock would be a salamander in serious trouble. Locals in the Appalachian Mountains have called salamanders spring lizards for generations, which is a charming name, but scientifically speaking, not a lizard. Salamanders are actually much more closely related to frogs and toads than to lizards. They're ancient. The salamander family has been around for about 160 million years. They were here when the dinosaurs were here. They outlasted the dinosaurs. They'll probably outlast a lot of things. Now, how do we know how many species of salamanders live in the Great Smoky Mountains? That's a great question, because counting every species in a park this big and this wild is not easy. So in 1998, scientists launched something called the Altaxa Biodiversity Inventory, which is a very long name for a very cool project. ATBI for short. The idea was simple: count every living thing in the park, every plant, every insect, every fungus, every worm, every salamander, all of it. Scientists have been carefully searching and cataloging for over 25 years now, and they keep finding things, including salamander species nobody has ever documented in the park before. So when scientists say there are more than 30 species of salamanders in the Great Smoky Mountains, that's not a guess. That's the result of decades of extremely careful, extremely muddy field work. And the number is impressive enough that scientists gave this park a nickname. They call it the salamander capital of the world. Not the bear capital, not the waterfall capital, the salamander capital. More different types of salamanders in this one park than anywhere else on Earth. Which, when you think about it, when you think about how many forests and rivers and wild places exist on this planet, it's pretty amazing. Okay, 30 plus species of salamanders in one park. Scientists named it the world capital. But why here? Why do so many different kinds of salamanders all live in these particular mountains? Here's what scientists think happened. About 20,000 years ago, there was an ice age. During the ice age, massive glaciers, walls of ice miles thick, crept southward across North America. They didn't quite reach the Smoky Mountains, but they got close. And as the glaciers pushed down from the north, all the animals and plants that lived in their path had to move. They spread south, ahead of the ice. The Appalachian Mountains, and specifically the Great Smoky Mountains, became a refuge, a place where species that had been pushed out of their northern homes could survive. The animals that were adapted to the colder northern weather, they found a home high up in the mountains. Then the glaciers melted and many of the animals stayed, and over thousands of years, isolated in different valleys and at different elevations, they evolved separately. One original species would split into two, then four, then more, each slightly different, each adapted to its particular corner of these mountains. If you listen to the first episode of our great Smoky Mountain series, this might sound familiar. It's the same reason the park has more tree species in all of Europe. It's the same reason the forest looks smoky. Everything connects. The ancient mountains, the ice age, the moisture, the undisturbed wilderness, all of it adds up to one of the most extraordinary collections of life on Earth. And salamanders, cold, wet, built exactly for this kind of mountain environment, flourished. Here's where things get truly strange. Of the more than 30 salamander species in the Great Smoky Mountains, 24 of them, nearly all of them, they have no lungs. None, no lungs at all. Scientists call them lungless salamanders, which is admirably straightforward naming. Their scientific family name is plethodontidae, which sounds impressive at dinner parties, also hard to remember. But the important part is what's missing, the lungs. So how do they breathe? Through their skin. I know. Let's talk about how this actually works because it's not magic. Your blood is always carrying oxygen to your body's cells and picking up carbon dioxide to carry away. In humans, that exchange happens in the lungs. You breathe in. Oxygen passes through the thin walls of tiny air sacs and into your blood. Carbon dioxide passes out. You breathe out. In a lungless salamander, that same exchange happens through the skin. The skin has to be thin and moist for gases to pass through it. Oxygen from the air or water around them seeps directly through the skin and into tiny blood vessels just underneath. Carbon dioxide seeps back out the same way. The salamander's entire body surface is a breathing organ, every single inch of skin working all the time. This is why they need to stay moist. If the skin dries out, the gas exchange stops. A lungless salamander that dries out completely cannot breathe. Dry skin won't let the gases through. This is also why you find them under logs, under rocks, in stream beds, in leaf litter, anywhere that's cool and damp. They're not hiding. Well, I guess they are hiding, but mainly they're keeping their skin working. After all that learning, it's time for our brain break of this episode. Who's ready to hear a park sound? I'll play it, see if you can guess what it is. Ready? The animal sounds like it's saying words. I'll play it again one more time, and then we'll find out the answer after the break. That sound is from a barred owl. So people who love birds have been saying this for a long time. The barred owl sounds like it's asking, who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? Say it out loud right now with the rhythm of those hoots. Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? The barred owl is one of the most common owls in the Great Smoky Mountains, and one of the easiest to find. Not by sight, but by sound. They call year round, day and night. If you've ever been camping in the eastern United States and heard owls in the dark, there's a very good chance it was a barred owl asking about dinner. Here's the fun part. If you imitate that call in the woods, a barred owl will sometimes call right back. They're territorial and they want to know who's in their forest. Okay, back to salamanders. Now within the salamander world of the Smokies, there's one species that deserves its own moment, the Hellbender. The Hellbender salamander is North America's largest salamander. It can grow up to 29 inches long. That's about the size of a skateboard. Isn't that crazy? I always thought salamanders were small, but here we are with one the size of a small dog. It weighs up to five and a half pounds, and it's fully aquatic, meaning it lives entirely underwater. It almost never comes out. It has a broad, flat head and a long paddle-shaped tail, and loose folds of wrinkled skin running down its sides. It has been described as looking like a creature from another era because it essentially is. Hellbenders have been living in the rivers of eastern United States for about 65 million years. The dinosaurs may have disappeared, but the hellbender stayed. Over the years, people have given the hellbender a remarkable collection of nicknames. Snot otter, isn't that silly? Devil Dog, Lasagna Lizard. Who came up with lasagna lizard? It's silly because it's actually a very gentle creature. They're shy and they hide during the day. It's at night when they come out to eat crayfish, insects, or small fish. The hellbender technically does have lungs, but it almost never uses them. It breathes almost entirely through those wrinkled folds of skin along its sides. The folds increase its surface area, which means more skin in contact with the oxygen-rich water, which means more breathing. Here's another crazy thing about hellbender breathing, and I want you to hear this carefully. A scientist once surgically removed a hellbender's lungs just to see it would happen. And the hellbender was completely fine. This salamander continued living completely normally, as if nothing had changed. The lungs were so unnecessary that removing them made no difference whatsoever. It was the skin doing the work the entire time. Okay, on to the next cool salamander of this episode. This one is named the Jordan salamander, and it's almost the opposite of the Hellbender. It's small, only about three to five inches long, and it's slate gray to glue black in color. And it has a very distinctive feature. Bright red or orange patches on its cheeks, like tiny painted flames on the sides of its face. But those cheeks are not decoration. They're a warning. Jordan salamander has toxic secretions in its skin. Chemicals that taste absolutely terrible to anything that tries to eat it. The red cheeks are basically a sign that says, I know you're looking at me, I know I'm small, try it anyway and see what happens. Predators learn. Bright colors in nature often mean don't. Jordan salamander figured that out a long time ago, but the red cheeks aren't even the best part. Scientists, they once watched a garter snake attacking a Jordan salamander. The snake grabbed it, and this salamander is little, so it's very easy for a snake to grab it. In the salamander's skin, it produced a thick, sticky mucus, a slime so powerful that it glued the snake's jaw shut. The snake was stuck, it couldn't open its mouth, it couldn't even move properly, and the salamander walked away. Jordan salamander, three to five inches long, walks away from a snake using slime. So Jordan salamander lives only in a small corner of the southern Appalachians, mostly in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Scientists call species like this endemic, meaning it evolved in one specific place and exists almost nowhere else on Earth. Within its small range, there's a lot of them. Thousands of them are out there right now, under rocks, under logs, wandering the forest floor on rainy nights. Most visitors walk right past them every single day without ever knowing. Okay, scouts, you now know a lot about salamanders. Here's how to find one. The good news is that salamanders are everywhere in the right habitat. You just have to know where to look. Rule number one, look where it's damp. Salamanders need moisture. A dry, sunny hillside has almost no salamanders. A shady stream bank, a mossy log on a forest floor, a flat rock in a creek. That's where you look. Rule number two, look under things. Salamanders hide. They spend their days tucked under logs, rocks, bark, and leaves. Gently lift the edge of a log and look underneath. Often you'll find them just sitting there waiting for night. The park asks you not to lift rocks and streams though, because that's where some salamanders lay their eggs. Rule number three. If you find one, observe it first. Watch it for 30 seconds. Notice the color, the size, whether it has spots or stripes. Does it have gills that you can see? That tells you something about the species. After you've looked, and this is very important, put everything back exactly as you found it. In streams, look in clear, shallow water. Some species live right in the stream bed, tucked under rocks where the current isn't too strong. Others prefer the edges under the stream bank. And after rain is the best time of all. Rain brings the salamanders out. They wander on the forest floor in wet weather, which makes them much easier to spot. A warm rainy night in the smoky mountain forest is salamander paradise. Alright, scouts, it's wild card time. This game is called Two Truths and a Lie. Okay. Three statements about salamanders. Two of them are true and one of them I made up. Are you ready? Statement one. Salamanders can regrow lost body parts. Not just their tails, but some species can regrow their legs, their eyes, and even parts of their heart. Statement two. At any given moment, 90% of all the salamanders in a forest are underground. The ones you might actually see are the other 10%. Statement three. If you added up the weight of all the salamanders in the eastern United States, they would weigh more than the deer. Okay. All three of these sound pretty unbelievable. Which one do you think is the lie? So the lie is statement three. But statements one and two are completely true. Salamanders can regenerate lost limbs, eyes, and even in some species, parts of their heart. Scientists are actually studying this right now because they want to understand how it works. And whether humans might someday be able to do something similar. And 90% underground is real. Right now, wherever you are, if there are salamanders nearby, which there probably are, almost all of them are underneath you, hidden, waiting, doing whatever salamanders do underground, which is kind of a mystery. You just can't see them, which honestly is just how they like it. Every episode we get questions from scouts just like you. If you have a question about a national park, visit our website, nationalparkscouts.com, and you might find yourself on a future episode.
SPEAKER_01Hi, my name is Ben, and I am eight years old. If I found a salamander, is it safe to pick it up? Are they dangerous to touch?
SPEAKER_00This is such a great question, and the answer has two parts. Part one, are salamanders dangerous to you? Most salamanders in the smokies are completely harmless to pick up briefly. They won't bite, they won't sting. A few species have mild skin secretions, like the Jordan salamander, chemical defenses that make them taste bad to predators. If you pick up one of those and then touch your eyes or put your fingers in your mouth without washing your hands, that could be unpleasant. So don't touch your face and wash your hands after. But here's the more interesting part of the answer, part two. You are more dangerous to them than they are to you. Remember how salamanders breathe through their skin? And how their skin has to stay moist and thin so gases can pass through? That same skin, moist skin, is incredibly good at absorbing things from the outside world. Your hands, even clean hands, have oils, salts, traces of sunscreen, bug spray, soap residue, lotion, things that are completely harmless to you. But if a salamander absorbs those things through its skin, it could hurt the salamander. So the rule isn't be careful because they might hurt you. The real rule is be careful because you might hurt them. Time for your scout mission. Here's your at-home mission. After the next rain, go outside and look under a log, a flat rock, or a piece of bark in a shaded, damp spot. Do it gently. Slide it to the side, don't flip it. See what's living there. You might find a salamander, you might find a worm, a pillbug, a centipede, a beetle. All of them are part of the same underground world. Look for 30 seconds and then put everything back exactly as you found it. If you're visiting the Great Smoky Mountains, find a clear, shallow stream. Look in the water along the edges and watch the stream bottom carefully. You might spot one moving without disturbing anything at all. Bonus challenge for both missions. Try to describe what you found to someone. Color, size, any markings, whether it had gills. That's called field science. What did you learn today that most adults don't know? I learned that a scientist once surgically removed a hellbender's lungs, and the hellbender was completely fine. It kept living, it kept breathing through its skin. Exactly as it had been doing all along. Those lungs were so unnecessary that their absence made no difference. Twenty four of the salamander species in the Great Smoky Mountains have no lungs at all. They breathe entirely through their skin every moment of every day. And the one species that does have lungs, the hellbender, doesn't really use them anyway. That's our episode, scouts! We learned from What a salamander actually is, and why it's definitely not a lizard. We found out why the smokies have more salamander species than anywhere else on Earth. We met the Hellbender, the biggest salamander around, and we found the Jordan salamander, which lives only here in this one park. Not bad for something most people walk right past. Next time, we're done being quiet, we're done being small, we're done looking under logs. Because episode four is about the animal that has been the symbol of this park since the very beginning. The one that stops traffic. The one that scientists call the most famous resident of the great Smoky Mountains, the black bear, is next. And trust me, there's a lot more to know about this animal than you think. Scouts, your next adventure is waiting!