A Southwest Virginia salamander success story

“Oh my God. Oh my God. That's awesome.” So today is a really special day. You know, I've been at this now for close to 20 years, and today's the first time we released hellbenders back to the wild. When I reached in to the release site and I opened the little holding container, they all swam into the corners and found little places to hide. That moment is a moment that I'll never going to forget. It’s a milestone out of all the work that we've been doing to try to understand the species and to try to protect it. So hellbenders have been eliminated from hundreds of streams across their range. They tend to thrive in cooler, well oxygenated, clean streams with lots and lots of large boulder habitat. So in Appalachia, the reason why they still occur in reasonable numbers compared to other parts of their historical range is because we still have some of that habitat intact, and that's one of the things we're trying to protect. We now know that hellbender dads will take care of their babies for about eight months. That's a really long time. What we've determined is that in sites where we have poor water quality, they're not taking care of their young. We don't know why yet. We're trying to solve that mystery. But in the meantime, we're trying to step in and do the dad’s job for them. And so what we're doing is we're actually collecting eggs from the field that we know are destined to fail. We're bringing those into the lab, raising them up until they're little babies. And then we bring them back to their natal sites and release them. So when we're out working in the streams and we talk to local citizens, they tell us that they used to see hellbenders all the time in the streams. And they haven't seen one in decades. What we're hoping to do is restore these populations so that one day future generations can come out, enjoy these streams, and maybe have the chance to see this remarkable species out in the wild.