Saving a salamander may require human intervention

So we just wrapped up a 10 year research project where we were studying reproductive behavior and nest success in hellbenders across a land use gradient. And that study's really important because we were able to show that as habitat becomes degraded, hellbender fathers who normally care for their young for like eight months out of the year, they quit doing that and we don't know why. We just know it's related to degraded habitat. And so we're trying to solve that mystery and figure out what that trigger is. So today we were checking for hellbender nests, and basically what we do is we go out and we collect the eggs, bring them back into what we call an egg bin, where we have a little fancy set up and we can photograph the eggs to then take that data back to the lab, and then we also process the animal. Egg viability is really important because we know that hellbenders are declining, and we know they're declining because something is wrong with their reproduction, so it's really important to know whether or not water quality is impacting egg viability. This is our captive rearing system here at Virginia Tech in Steger Hall. Each tank has hellbender eggs from a different nest that we collected in the field, and each tank is equipped with a bubbler system. This bubbler system turns the eggs over periodically, mimicking parental care and allowing for the eggs to develop normally. Everybody around here really talks about the trout fishing and stuff in southwest Virginia, But we've got hellbenders and healthy hellbender populations. That's a great indicator of the water quality that's there, which kind of trickles downstream to the trout and mussels and everything else that we have here in southwest Virginia. The plan is, over the next three or four years, is to head start hundreds, if not thousands, of babies into some of these streams. And we really want to head start babies in areas where the populations are declining, because we want to bolster those populations while restoration activities can take place. If not, we're going to lose those populations. They'll be gone forever.