I like hellbenders because they are so
different from anything else that we
have in this country even in this
hemisphere unlike a lot of other
salamanders they breathe entirely
through their skin and so imagine if you
are in a river and you're dragging your
lungs around behind you things are not
going to go well if that river is
polluted or muddy or murky hellbenders
are one of these unique species that
really is starting to show a decline in
the status throughout many States and
we're attributing that mainly to
temperature and water quality related
issues when you have this overall
warming trend when you have this
degradation of the streams you have
pollutants coming in animals can't stem
this wave of all these factors coming at
them at one time and that seems to be a
real big issue we know that hellbenders
are really sensitive to disease and we
find animals that have evidence of skin
disease quite often in the wild but we
don't know what's causing it what tends
to happen is that hellbenders start with
kind of a reddening of their bottom feet
and that can progress all the way to
loss of the entire foot that's pretty
serious
for a group of animals that tend to have
incredible healing abilities not to be
able to heal themselves we're completing
the second study now where we're
examining the impacts of warmer
temperatures on hellbenders and we're
doing this in a way that precisely
mimics the temperatures that they
experience in the wild so hour by hour
we recreate the exact temperatures that
we measure out in the river where they
came from and for a second group of
hellbenders we add about three degrees
to those hour by hour values and so one
of the things that we're looking at is
their ability to resist bacterial
infection by specifically looking at our
study and temperature variation and
understanding how that affects
hellbender physiology and how that makes
them resistant to bacteria that's just
one tiny piece of the large puzzle that
we need to solve in order to figure out
why they've lasted through mass
extinctions through ice ages and now
we're starting to see decline we need to
act now we don't want to have this
responsive crisis strategy and we
shouldn't wait until it's too late and
until there are only a few individuals
left