In Frankfort, Kentucky, Monte McGregor opens the door to what appears to be a normal three-car garage: a nondescript building on a concrete block with metal siding. But what’s inside looks like an intricate science project. And it is.
The building is full of giant water tanks laid out in long rows. All sorts of tubes run into them and fans hum in the background, keeping the water at a constant, cool temperature. On one side of the building sits a wall of glass fish tanks where dozens of slimy salamanders swim around and pack on top of each other.
This is a nursery that breeds eastern hellbenders for the Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources, and McGregor is an aquatic scientist.
He pulls a flashlight out of his pocket and shines it into a tank full of roughly foot-long salamanders – and they’re only teenagers.
“These are juveniles,” McGregor said. “They're about 14 months old, and they like to swim with their tail. They have a large tail – and you can actually see one swim in there.”
These hellbenders aren’t conventionally cute and cuddly critters, but they do have a certain bizarre charm. They can grow up to two and a half feet long, and their skin is wrinkly and comes in shades of brown and gray. They have wide, flat heads, tiny beady eyes and long flat tails. It’s earned the species nicknames like “snot otter” or “the last dragon.” McGregor said, at a glance, some people assume they must be poisonous. (They’re not).
“They're kind of slimy,” he said. “People are scared of them, but they're really, really majestic creatures.”
McGregor said Kentucky began studying them because their presence in streams signals really clean water. They can only live in clean water because they breathe through their skin. But clean, undisturbed streams have become something of a rarity.
“Three hundred years ago…people started, you know, cutting the trees down and mining all the coal and all that stuff. As a result of that, you know, the hellbenders have responded to the loss and in their habitat, basically, or the polluted water,” McGregor said. “They're very sensitive. We know they're there in some places, but they're pretty rare.”
So rare, that two weeks ago the federal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a proposal in December to officially declare them endangered. If it’s finalized, hellbenders would be afforded protections under the Endangered Species Act, meaning companies who do things like build bridges or log forests would have some extra permitting requirements.
Tierra Curry is with the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental conservation group. She said the designation has been a long time coming.
“I would say that hellbenders have been endangered, they just haven't gotten that recognition,” Curry said. “We've petitioned for [Endangered Species Act] protection for them back in 2010, so it's been 14 years to get them to the proposed state.”
Hellbenders are elusive, hiding under rocks during the day and coming out only at night to hunt. So it’s always been a struggle to get a firm sense of how many populations there really are. But biologists have a pretty good idea that less than 50 known populations of hellbenders are stable.
Curry said it took over a decade to get this far because the feds would always point to a handful of healthy hellbender colonies in western North Carolina and Tennessee – places that don’t have large amounts of coal – as evidence the amphibians didn’t need the protection.
Then in September, Hurricane Helene happened.
“So the rivers there rose to 20 and 30 feet high and…carried hellbenders out into farm fields, onto roads, into debris piles,” Curry said.
Poet Nickole Brown lives in Asheville. She heard those same stories of hellbenders washed up and smelled the chemicals and sewage lingering in the rivers after the flood.
“It was devastating on so many levels,” Brown said. “I'm sure that Hellbenders were not the only non-human species that were affected.”
Brown said hellbenders are special to many people in the mountains. The creature has lent inspiration to hellbender murals, music festivals, and breweries all over the East Coast.
Even Brown named her poetry collective, aimed at supporting poets exploring the climate crisis, after hellbenders.
“What was suggested to me was ‘the dandelion festival,’ was ‘the persimmon festival,’” she said. “They all sounded sweet, but I really wanted something that sounded just a tad bit more like a motorcycle rally.”
Hellbenders are a harbinger of healthy water, Brown said. They embody how ancient and fragile the region is and its need for vigorous protection and support, especially after Helene.
“By protecting the species, you are talking about protecting an entire area,” she said. “You're talking about, ultimately, protecting the people of this region.”
Curry, with the environmental group, expects the federal government to finalize the salamanders’ endangered status sometime next year. With a new administration coming in, her group will be watching closely.
“So if anything goes awry with that, it will be the result of political interference and we will go back to court,” Curry said. “This is not a species I'm ever going to give up on.”
In the meantime, those teenage salamanders McGregor is growing in his tanks are expected to be released into the wilds of Kentucky next year.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
