One blind, aquatic salamander may have sat mostly still for seven years
Once upon a time, olms knew the cool drizzle of rain and bathed in the glow of the sun. But millions of years ago, these aquatic salamanders moved to underwater caves beneath southeastern Europe’s Dinaric Alps and evolved into the pale, blind, foot-long creatures known today (SN: 4/20/16). Now, a study reveals one trait that may help olms inhabit these caverns that have little food: The salamanders don’t seem to move much. One olm even appeared to haunt roughly the same spot for seven years within a limestone cave in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, researchers report online January 28 in the Journal of Zoology. The pitch-black cave was seemingly full of the creatures when zoologist Gergely Balázs of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and his colleagues began searching for olms (Proteus anguinus) about 10 years ago. After repeated dives in the cave, the researchers began to suspect that they were seeing the same olms in the same spots each time. So starting in 2010, the...