Monday, March 17, 2014

It’s a fish…it’s a gator…it’s a Hellbender??

Imagine, the next time you go fishing in the local river you latch on to something big, something slimy, something that belongs on the SyFy channel! You just caught an Eastern Hellbender, a 25 inch aquatic salamander! Perhaps you’ve heard of these gargantuan amphibians referred to as “snot otters”, “mud-devils” or the “Allegheny alligator”, but their true name is the Eastern Hellbender, Cryptobranchus alleganiensis.  If this sounds more like a prehistoric monster than a modern day salamander, well it sort of is.  The hellbender has been roaming the most pristine rivers for the past 65 million years.  It takes these monsters about 60 years to reach their impressive maximum length of around 25 inches.  To put an age relationship on this, a full grown adult hellbender today was probably hatched near the end of the Korean War! When this baby boomer was hatched from under a large rock in a very clean river it had large external gills that it used to get oxygen from the water in order to breath.  After about two years our salamander underwent a small change where it lost its external gills and developed lungs (like us) to breathe with.  By age 5, our salamander learned all about “the birds and the bees” and soon after began its reproductive life.
Although you may think it seems like a glamorous life for any salamander to live an amazing 60 years, our friend the Eastern Hellbender has undergone many challenges and sorrowful times.  You see, hellbenders require the very cleanest and pollution free waters to live in.  However, the effects of general pollution, putting dams on waterways and poor farming habits (like overuse of fertilizers, herbicides/insecticides, and removal of trees along waterways) have lowered the quality of much of the waterways in Ohio.  Consequently, the population of the eastern hellbender has plummeted.  The once well-established populations of hellbenders has been recently placed on the list of the endangered species by the Ohio Division of Wildlife and has presumed it to be completely extirpated from the western part of the state, of where it once thrived.  Luckily though, there are groups who are trying to help with the conservation and recovery of the Eastern Hellbender in Ohio. 
One group trying to help the hellbender is “The Ohio Hellbender Partnership”.  This group is working to survey the rivers so they can keep tabs on the status of the giant salamanders.  When they do catch a hellbender they give it a stress test by looking at their blood and they test the immune abilities of the salamander.  The researchers are also collecting eggs so they can hatch young in captivity, in hopes of increasing the success rate.  Some researchers are even placing radio chips in the adult salamanders so that they can be monitored without being caught/disturbed again.  After 65 million years of roaming the rivers of Ohio and the eastern United States it would be a shame to lose these amazing animals.  Although joining a hellbender conservation group may not be your thing, you can still help by just limiting pollution.  So quit polluting and help raise a little hell-bender!



This is a picture of Greg Lipps, one of the leading researchers on the Eastern Hellbender. He is measuring an adult hellbender around 23 inches that we caught in Captina Creek, Ohio. There were EPA members present also who took blood samples and inserted the radio chips.



Written by Scott Spreng

           
Hellbender. Department of natural resources. Retrieved from http://www.dnr.state.oh.us/Home/species_a_to_z/SpeciesGuideIndex/hellbender/tabid/6659/Default.aspx

Lipps, Greg. The Ohio Hellbender Partnership. Retrieved from http://home.greglipps.com/surveys/eastern-hellbender/ohio-hellbender-partnership

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