The Hellbender is North America's largest salamander.
It's an ancient amphibian dating back about 160
million years, for which it has remained relatively
unchanged. It's a fully aquatic salamander living
most of its entire life underwater, from when
it's an egg to a larvae to a juvenile, as
well as an adult. It's a long lived amphibian
it's been documented to live over 30 years in the
wild. They can be very slimy.
They’re actually very strong, very muscular.
The Hellbender as an adult can reach up to 2 feet in length.
They eat mainly crayfish. They need cool, clean, clear, rocky streams to live in…
It’s one of those animals that has such unique characteristics that everyone
has their own nickname for it – water dog, devil dog, or snot otter
is one of the names that people come up with...
Indiana like many other states have been
monitoring the Hellbender populations over time.
What we've discovered is that populations
are unfortunately in decline. What this has done
is prompted an extensive collaboration among
various agencies including university faculty
and staff, state and federal agencies, zoos,
The Nature Conservancy, and of course, private
citizens throughout the watershed.
The department of natural resources looks for people to help them
conserve endangered species to learn enough information to manage them.
The Department of Natural Resources started surveying for Hellbenders back in 1998.
We set up 12 different locations that we survey about every year.
Mainly, we’re going out and flipping over large rocks.
Looking for good habitats that they may be under.
The Hellbender likes to have large flat rocks that they can use for protection.
We all need habitat. Habitat can be broken down in to
three things – food, shelter, air, and in this
case good water to drink.
Just as we need those things, the Hellbender needs those things, also.
If the Hellbender population is declining, then something is wrong with one of those three things.
There are several conservation strategies that
many states are implementing across the range
to try to reverse the declines that we're seeing
in Hellbender populations. One of those is
captive propogation. That is essentially removing
eggs from the wild, taking those eggs to a zoo
or a university, or a fish hatchery, and rearing
those until they hatch in to larvae. Then,
rear those larvae for a couple of years to
ultimately release those animals back out in
to the wild.
We went to the Dallas-Fort Worth zoo and collected 18 juvenile Eastern Hellbenders
which were actually reared from an egg mass out in the wild from West Virginia.
They ran out of room at the facilities there and then,
we went to Dallas to get them and have been raising them for a year and a half.
We are in an environmental chamber at Purdue’s Aquatic Research Laboratory.
We’ve got ten tanks and each of them have a set of Hellbenders in them.
When we first started, we didn’t have these rocks in here.
So, it was pretty bare, and we mostly kept the water clean, kept them fed, and kept record of their health
to make sure nothing was out of place and to make sure they looked healthy and happy
and that everyone’s eating.Now, we’ve been working to add in more environmental factors.
For these surgical procedures, I had to implant a radio transmitter into their body cavity
and through that I am able to track the animal’s movements throughout the Blue River.
The main purpose and goal behind doing this is to determine whether or not moving Hellbenders
throughout the river can be a good method used for future purposes.
Questions regarding which animals to move and
where to move them are often times best
answered using genetics. This requires a lot
of field work and a lot of collaboration and
a lot of lab work.
We’ll extract the DNA, and we’ll actually look at that DNA and how it compares across the whole range.
How populations are differentiated and how individuals are within populations.
Looking at overall genetic diversity because it’s important to document these levels of genetic
diversity that remain in the wild, as these populations become more and more increasingly fragmented and
isolated. It’s important to be able to look a this from a genetics perspective and see what
genetic stock remains in nature.
My part of the project is to bring the eggs we find in the Blue River put them in to this apparatus called a
Heath Tray and raise them until they’re a year or two old and we will release them back in to the wild.
Basically what it does is the water sort of wells up and the eggs are sort of sandwiched
in there between two layers of screen. The upwelling water keeps them from touching each other
and keeps them off of the bottom. This reduces infection and disease transmission.
As states begin implementing conservation strategies
that actually increase local densities of Hellbenders,
that also increases a likelihood that people are going to come in to contact with this animal.
That automatically raises questions for people:
What is this animal? What do we do with it?
Who do we notify? So, one of the things that we're
focused on is increasing public awareness.
We're fortunate to be able to partner with specialists
from our social science department to address
questions and give us information as to how
we should go about this.
My role is to understand the human dimensions of the Hellbender.
So, while we’re here putting them back in to the river and trying to protect the population.
How do we keep them in the river? Well, we have to help people understand what to do if they catch one
and make sure people know that they need to keep the water clean.
The people here love their natural resources – the river, woods, and caves.
So, I think part of our efforts with the Hellbender are trying to tie some of that love and appreciation and
stewardship of local natural resources to extend out to the Hellbender.
We have created a website through Purdue: helpthehellbender.org It has resources for
all different types of outreach: teachers, links for lesson plans, and things to do to bring Hellbenders
in to the classroom. There’s also information for home owners – add rain barrels to help with water quality.
There’s also information for anglers so what to do if they catch a Hellbender.
We want you to just cut the line. There’s information for every sort so that people can help.
The Hellbenders don’t have a voice and we are their voice, so its really important to me to help the public
understand this special creature that we all have near our home.
What I hope is that in five years, ten years, as the Indiana DNR continues to do surveys
in the Blue River that they’ll start to see the numbers start to rebound and they’ll start to see some of those
other age classes classes and natural reproduction that doesn’t require us to intervene.
As a scientist, a day like today where we’re releasing these juveniles to the stream is a great joy to me
because it means we are making positive steps in order to restore these animals. I think we are catching
them just in time and we have a great possibility of success.
One of the most rewarding portions of this project for me are all the collaborations that stem
from the various research projects. We're all working very hard to preserve this living fossil.