When hellbenders thrive, clean water flows downstream

One of the things that keeps me up at night is the fact that hellbenters have been around tens of millions of years, and now they're declining and disappearing from across their range, from Missouri to New York down to Georgia. So we've been studying hellbenters in Southwest Virginia for over 18 years now, and what we're trying to understand is how many of those animals actually survived through Hurricane Helene. And so what we're finding so far is that some populations actually fared pretty well, but we've got other sites where the populations were decimated we're looking at any distinguishing marks on it so any like notches in the tail any previous wounds that are possibly healing and we're writing all that down and then we put the animal in a weigh bag and we take it see how much it weighs today was pretty cool because we got that one that was like 1,400 grams 1420 Wow that's the biggest one I've ever seen everybody around here really talks about the trout fishing in southwest Virginia but when you start looking at stream quality and stream water chemistry the hellbender comes into play because it's a great indicator of the water quality that's there and my reason for being so passionate about it is this research takes place in southwest Virginia in the Appalachians and this is home to me. I grew up in this town. During my undergrad I started working with the Hopkins lab and helped on the various graduate projects. After graduation the position just kind of rolled into a full-time position with the partnership between Virginia Tech and the DWR and I think it's awesome that we get to do hands-on things with such a rare species. We now know that they're very sensitive to changes in land use so they live in the stream their entire life but if you cut down the forest that causes sediment to enter the stream and that affects their biology. I mean bottom line is if hellbenters aren't doing well, the trout aren't going to do well, the freshwater water muscles aren't going to do well and we all live downstream. We all need clean water.