Have you seen one of these?

[AchingBack]

I know I would not lick one in order to hallucinate.

 

[Big Bri]

I live in Lacombe, LA. We just replaced a pond on my property with a pool. We drained the pond. These were everywhere. Now the pond is gone. The ground is dry as a bone with the heat we've been having. These are still coming up out of the ground from time to time. I just recently caught one and released it to the ditch at the back of my property. I was a zoology major at LSU but I didn't peg what these were until about a week ago when I caught the last one and took a close look and saw the vestigial legs.

Wiki Description

Amphiumas have an elongated body, generally grey-black in color. They do have legs, but they are very small - while amphiumas can be up to 116 cm (46 in) long, their legs measure only up to about 2 cm (0.79 in). Therefore, they can resemble eels. They also lack eyelids or a tongue.[2]



did you see any that were close to 46" long

 

[Tvern13]

There were a lot of fairly large specimens. When the pool contractor started digging in the pond before setting the pool he asked if we had a lot of snakes around told him no. In 15 years living there I had killed 1 water mocassin and I have 1 black racer I see every time I mow. Other than that once or twice I'd seen a common red bellied water snake. Shortly after they started digging with the track hoe he came and got me saying they were seeing a bunch of snakes. I went and looked and pointed out they weren't snakes they were eels. I'd seen those in the pond a lot over the years but never paid them much attention. It wasn't till after the pond was gone and they were showing up in mud holes or even dry ground months after the pond was gone that I got curious and took a closer look and realised they weren't eels. I remember once before Katrina when we had a bridge over the pond seeing one swimming that was at least 30 - 36" long.