Anniella are pretty small animals, about as thick as a pencil and rarely more than 8 inches long. They spend their lives wiggling beneath loose, sandy soil, snacking on bugs and larvae.

They don't move fast or far, and the researchers say they may spend their whole lives in an area about the size of your dining room table.

Aside from that, scientists still don't know much about them.

"They are one of the most poorly studied reptiles in California," [Cal State Fullerton researcher James] Parham said. "Because they live under the sand, you can't see what they are doing, and you can't even do a mark-and-recapture because you can't reliably capture these things."

Parham and his coauthor Theodore Papenfuss, a herpetologist with the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, have been scouring the state for legless lizards for 15 years. When they began their research, only one type of legless lizard was known to live in California.

One of the four newly identified species of Anniella, the Southern California legless lizard, was found under some dead leaves in dunes at the west end of Los Angeles International Airport.

The Bakersfield legless lizard was found in three vacant lots in downtown Bakersfield.

The southern Sierra legless lizard was spotted in three dry canyons on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and the Temblor legless lizard was found in the oil fields around the city of Taft, on the southwestern edge of the San Joaquin Valley.

To find these lizards, the scientists scattered 2,000 pieces of cardboard and plywood throughout the state to create moist, cool areas, which appeal to the lizards. Then they returned months later to see if any of the lizards had shown up.

The Eastern Pacific Hawksbill sea turtle was considered critically endangered until about seven years ago, with many scientists considering the species extinct.

Scientists have now discovered that the turtles are once again arriving in the Gulf of Fonseca, a large body of water in western Central America that is shared by Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua.

"We know the Eastern Pacific Hawksbill turtle is arriving in the Gulf of Fonseca, but we do not know why, nor do we know if its life cycle has changed - if a large number stay in the gulf - or if it is due to food, nesting or even why they live here," [Honduran Natural Resources and Environment Secretariat director of biodiversity Rafael Amaro] Garcia said.

They are fungi, and they arrived in the United States from overseas with an assist from humans — through travel and trade. They prefer cold conditions and kill with precision, so efficiently that they’re creating a crisis in the wild.

The death toll on amphibians, bats and snakes from fungi represents “potential extinction events,” said [Dr. Jeremy] Coleman, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife research biologist who coordinates the government’s response to the bat-killing infection known as white-nose syndrome. It’s so large, he said, that it can’t be measured “as far as numbers of dead organisms,” and is “decimating populations as we know them.”

The sight of butterflies flocking onto the heads of yellow-spotted river turtles in the western Amazon rain forest is not uncommon, at least if one is able to sneak up on the skittish reptiles. But the reason why butterflies congregate onto the turtles may be stranger than you think: to drink their tears.

The butterflies are likely attracted to the turtles' tears because the liquid drops contain salt, specifically sodium, an important mineral that is scant in the western Amazon, said Phil Torres, a scientist who does much of his research at the Tambopata Research Center in Peru and is associated with Rice University.

Unlike butterflies, turtles get plenty of sodium through their largely carnivorous diet.

Sometime after July 23, property owner Jess Christensen started noticing a lot of snake activity in the evening around his house, located on County Road 717 just north of Metalton.

"Really what really hit me was how close they were to the house," Christensen said. "I just looked at the statistics and knew that one day I will be bitten if I don't do anything, so I thought to get a professional opinion about it."

So he called Dale Ertel, who runs the educational exhibit Snake World and helps people remove dangerous snakes from their property. Ertel has been collecting snakes for over 50 years, he said. He got his first venomous snake when he was 15 and has been bitten by nonpoisonous snakes countless times. He has been bitten only once by a venomous snake, a diamond back that he still owns.

"The first time he called, he said he'd seen over a dozen in his yard," Ertel said. "So a friend of mine and I went out there the following night and we found over 12 that first night, and we have been back several times since, and it seems like every time we have gone back we are finding at least 12 [copperheads]."

Ertel's friend counted more than 118 snakes collected from Christensen's property.

Snakes in unexpected places can startle anyone. For Bruce Ahlswede the unexpected place was a San Antonio Starbucks bathroom, where he had stopped on Tuesday after a business presentation.

He froze for a moment thinking the snake, lying across the toilet, was a toy left by a prankster.

Then it started to move. He backed out of the room and found a store employee.
"I said "Hey you've got a snake in your bathroom and she’s kind of freaking out,'" Ahlswede told CNN affiliate KSAT. Bruce, his wife and store employees all crowded into the bathroom and watched as the snake, perhaps just as surprised as the rest, slithered around the toilet bowl and disappeared, the station reported.

The snakes and other reptiles were turned over to animal protection authorities at state agency Mattilsynet, but were expected to be put to death.

But now the cause of the fire salamanders’ rapid decline has been revealed. According to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the fire salamanders in the Netherlands contracted a previously unknown fungus related to Bd, the fungus that causes chytridiomycosis. The paper dubs the new fungus Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans spec. nov. It causes superficial erosions on the salamanders’ skin, followed by deep ulcerations and microscopic skin necrosis. Captive-bred amphibians which the scientists exposed to the fungus died in as little as seven days.

"At this moment we don’t know the origin of the fungus," says the paper’s lead author, An Martel of the Department of Pathology, Bacteriology and Avian Diseases at Ghent University. "It can be an endemic species that became virulent or it can be an invasive species that was introduced in the Netherlands. Worldwide monitoring can give us an answer to this question. But still, if the fungus would spread a lot of amphibian populations are at risk."