Do you see these? They're Ozark hellbender babies, propagated in captivity due to the disappearance of their stock in Missouri's rivers. The decline of populations in the past century has led to their unfortunate positioning on the federal endangered species list.
The St. Louis Zoo and the Missouri Department of Conversation has been working the past decade to keep this incredible creature--the only giant salamander this side of Asia, and a bit of a boggler when it comes to figuring out how it came to exist in North America--from passing into extinction. In November 2011, the captive breeding program successfully hatched this batch of babies.
My first introduction to the elusive hellbender was in biology class; Doc Hatch had a preserved specimen in a gallon jar on his desk that elicited plenty of awe from us all and particularly great horror from most of the girls.
I saw a hellbender in person while gigging with my brother and dad one night on a trip home from college. For the uninitiated, you gig by taking a john boat rigged with halogen lights out on the river at night, allowing you to see the contents of the murky river that are invisible in the daylight. A skilled hand can use the gig pole tipped with a small trident to spear freshwater suckers, a fish most people don't cotton to much since it's rather boney. My brother, remembering the bottled hellbender from biology class, made a point to show me the hellbender wiggling quickly back down out of sight. To this day I consider that sighting of an Ozark hellbender in its natural habitat paramount to seeing a sasquatch or a wild okapi.
There are two subspecies of North America's Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, which together form the genus Cryptobranchus and join the Andrias genus of Asian giant salamanders to form the Cryptobranchidae family. Fossil records of these giant salamanders date back 65 million years, making them a truly remarkable creature in my mind.
One subspecies, Cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis, known in vernacular as an Allegheny alligator, is found in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky,
Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama,
Mississippi, Oklahoma and
Kansas. The Ozark variety, known as Cryptobranchus alleganiensis bishopi, is found only in the rivers of lower Missouri and upper Arkansas, but in the past few decades, populations have dwindled to nearly nil.
No one truly knows how giant salamanders came to exist in North America. I, of course, have wacky theories related to Missouri's many caves, but we won't get into that right now. Considering they've been preying on and falling prey to the other creatures in their ecosystem in the rivers of my home state for thousands of years, I certainly hope this anomaly's time has not come. Some deride the Missouri Department of Conservation for its sometimes unexpected maneuvers, but I personally laud the captive propagation of Ozark hellbenders. It'll be a sad day in my heart should this five-fingered living fossil ever find itself locked in history for keeps.
