Protect Species Podcast

Saving the Snot Otters: Humor, Habitat, and Hope for Hellbenders

Global Center for Species Survival Season 1 Episode 10

What makes the hellbender North America's most captivating salamander? Join Monni Böhm and guest host/producer Kelly Griese as they unravel this mystery with humor and keen insights. You'll laugh along as we talk about quirky hellbender names and hear from Nick Burgmeier, a wildlife specialist from Purdue University, who gives us the lowdown on these unique amphibians.

Nick helps us understand the challenges facing these cute-in-their-own-way creatures. From habitat degradation and agricultural runoff, hellbenders face an upstream swim for survival, but powerful partnerships are helping to protect and grow hellbender populations. Learn about the zoos, conservationists, farmers and landowners coming together to ensure a bright future for the "snot otter." We'll also share information about how YOU can contribute to hellbender conservation.

Links:
Help the Hellbender
Helping Hellbenders: Conservation Program Repopulates Indiana Waterways
Hellbender in the Blue - documentary
Hellbent - documentary 

Dr. Monni Böhm:

All lasagna sites snot, otter, allegheny, alligator, devil, dog. Has any animal ever had more delightful assemblages of names? I don't think so. Hellbenders are clearly the coolest of all amphibians. We'll discuss that a bit later.

Kelly Griese:

I'm Monni Böhm and I'm Kelly Griese. I am filling in for Justin. Welcome to the Protect Species podcast, where we celebrate biodiversity and converse with conservationists.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Kelly, what have you done to Justin?

Kelly Griese:

I would tell you, but you would have to join him. No, I'm just kidding, Justin's fine.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

He's just off today, so uh in which case I would love to join him.

Kelly Griese:

Pto would be lovely right now. It would be such a lovely thing. Maybe we should all take the day off. Um, yeah, I, I'm just filling in for Justin now, although, um, I have been told that some listeners are curious about me, especially after the episode in which you discussed my shark army, your shark army.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I do remember that. I do remember that let's not talk about it.

Kelly Griese:

Let's not talk about it. Let's not talk about it ever again. Today we're talking about hellbenders, which might be my second favorite grouping of animals after sharks, because hellbenders are amazing.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I mean, any giant salamander is pretty amazing, that's true. I once met a giant salamander called Professor Wu.

Kelly Griese:

That's such a good name.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

It is a very good name, very learned individual. As you can tell from his title. It was actually the Chinese giant salamander at London Zoo and I wanted to make sure that he has a self-help column in our membership letter. But nobody let me run this. You know, apparently I was anthropomorphizing a little bit.

Kelly Griese:

And I mean. I agree I did, but you're a woman ahead of her time, monty, and not everyone appreciates your rare brand of genius, genius Good excellent.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I'm glad that's the word you chose. He just had a very all-knowing face and I figured if you just ask him I know any of your personal problems he could give really good advice.

Kelly Griese:

Yeah, yeah, we're going to be talking with Nick today and maybe he can give us some advice as well.

Nick Burgmeier:

Yes.

Kelly Griese:

You and I have obviously talked to Nick many times before, never met him. He says such good things about you, monty, but we have done some of these Hellbender releases. We're going to talk about that today a little bit and talk about our ridiculously cool neighbors here at the Global Center that happen to be salamanders. I was just about to ask who could our neighbors be, but you kind of obviously gave the answer already.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Yeah.

Kelly Griese:

I couldn't wait to tell people.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

And since we can't wait to tell people, maybe we should just get on with it. Hey, nick, it's so great to have you here. Thanks for coming in. Can you just start and introduce yourself for our listeners, please?

Nick Burgmeier:

Yeah, I'm Nick Burgmeier. I'm an Extension Wildlife wildlife specialist with Purdue University and I oversee the Help the Hellbender project in Indiana.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

That is so cool In case our listeners are not totally aware of what a hellbender is. I mean, you know it's very flowery language, so you could have all sorts of imaginative things of what a hellbender is. What exactly is it Describe a hellbender?

Nick Burgmeier:

A hellbender is North America's largest salamander, so it's the third largest salamander in the world, behind the Japanese giant and the Chinese giant salamanders, and they basically just look like giant hellbenders. So a hellbender would be about 20 inches 24 inches long, whereas the giant salamanders would actually be the size of a small person.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

The size of a small person. I love it. Actually sorry when.

Kelly Griese:

I say a small person.

Nick Burgmeier:

I mean like a four to five foot tall person, so they're very large.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

But they actually don't look like a person. In fact, they look pretty much like I don't know they look weird. I mean, in fact, they look pretty much like I don't know they look weird. I mean the one. So Nick is actually wearing, like appropriately a Help the Hellbender t-shirt and, to be quite honest, if you just look at it really, really quickly, should I say what it looks like? It looks like poo.

Kelly Griese:

It seems appropriate.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

It looks like a turd. Yes.

Nick Burgmeier:

I mean yeah, if you only see part of it. If only you see part of it. Yeah, I mean yeah if you only see part of it.

Kelly Griese:

Yeah, we should note for the listeners that Nick is sitting with his arms crossed across his chest, and so you can only see really like a section of the hellbender's body, and it very much does look like a giant floater.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Monty, it does indeed, which obviously is a mussel species, not what you were all thinking.

Kelly Griese:

Monty's favorite mussel species and my favorite as such. Maybe we should back up a little bit, Monty, and talk about what salamanders are. What are salamanders?

Nick Burgmeier:

So salamanders are a group of amphibians. So when we think of amphibians you know we're talking about slimy skin and shell-less kind of jelly-like eggs, mostly aquatic larvae, that eventually come out of water. So that's the or. Amphibian actually means the double life, and salamanders are a subgroup of that. So there's frogs, salamanders and caecilians which are sort of a tropical legless, worm-like amphibian. But salamanders they kind of have that standard. They look like slimy lizards. Essentially They've got four legs. They don't have any external ears. So unlike frogs where you can see the ear behind the eye, salamanders don't have that and they have gilled larvae and usually the salamanders we would see in Indiana and most of the places they are four to six inches long and they're usually pretty colorful and live under logs and rocks in the forest.

Kelly Griese:

Yeah, you're talking about a lot of the terrestrial salamanders that we see, but hellbenders are different. How are they different?

Nick Burgmeier:

So hellbenders are a lot different than everything I just said, so so they don't live that double life.

Nick Burgmeier:

They start in the water and they stay in the water. They're, they're, fully aquatic species. They live in the cleanest rivers and streams. You won't find them in ponds or lakes and you won't find them in drainage ditches. It's just really clean, pristine rivers and streams, vitamin drainage ditches it's just really clean, pristine rivers and streams. And they start out. They're really a lot like fish. So they have those aquatic eggs. They're externally fertilized by the male and once they hatch they live their whole lives in the water and stick there.

Kelly Griese:

That is very cool, I want to be fully aquatic. Monty, would you be fully aquatic? That is very cool, I want to be fully aquatic.

Nick Burgmeier:

Monty, would you be fully aquatic if possible?

Kelly Griese:

Sure, I would be fully aquatic. Sure, why not? We've seen you aquatic at times because you go on these release efforts and maybe I should back up a little bit then and talk about that. So we've already talked about hellbenders. They live in rivers, really clean rivers. Where do they live here in Indiana?

Nick Burgmeier:

In Indiana. They can really at this point only be found in one river in southern Indiana. It's called the Blue River. It runs through Harrison, washington, crawford counties down in southern Indiana. It's an Ohio River tributary. Historically in Indiana they could be found in most of the Ohio River tributaries that had the appropriate habitat, which would be, you know, big, huge rocks for them to hide under sort of gravel cobble bottom or with bedrock with big crevices in it, very clean, forested, that type of habitat. You know a lot of rivers now are kind of muddy. You don't see those rocky bottoms anymore, and so that really just kind of leaves us with the Blue River and a couple of other streams where they don't have hellbenders anymore, but they could probably survive if they were ever there again.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

So currently hellbenders are a threatened species in Indiana, right? So what actually? What actually specifically happened to them? How fast have they declined? I mean, you already mentioned that they disappeared from pretty much everywhere, but what? What specifically do we need to do? Do we need to address in terms of getting those little old lasagna sites? Is that a name?

Nick Burgmeier:

Yeah, it was one of them. Yeah, good, sometimes I mix them up, I just come up with weird little Alleghen old lasagna sites Is that a name?

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Yeah, it was one of them. Yeah, good, sometimes I mix them up. I just come up with weird little Allegheny lasagna sites, or something like that, to restore these rivers for hellbenders.

Nick Burgmeier:

Well, so hellbenders, the main decline started probably sometime in the middle 20th century and it was relatively rapid in the sense that there were some older herpetologists that were doing surveys and they found hellbenders all over the Midwest and the Southeast. And then sometime in the middle 20th centuries they all started noting oh well, we're not finding larvae anymore, we're not finding juveniles anymore, we're just finding these big, old adults. And in a lot of those rivers they noted over the next couple of decades oh well, we find fewer and fewer big, older adults. And then it's, we don't find any older adults, they've all just disappeared. And in Indiana that happened by about 1980, roughly somewhere around there.

Nick Burgmeier:

I don't think there was a biologist that did some surveys throughout southern Indiana. He only found him in the Blue River. There have been a handful of individuals in a couple other creeks found since, but you know we're talking one like 20 or 30 year old animal that that's been there for a for a long time, and so that was primarily caused by, in most places by agricultural runoff. You know, in some places there might be mine runoff, more urban suburban runoff, but it's primarily really the clearing of trees and then the subsequent runoff into the stream and either the forms of sediment runoff which covers all the bottoms and makes it kind of a mud stream so it's not good anymore, or chemical runoff anything like that, anything that reduces the water quality bad for the hellbenders. Anything like that, anything that reduces the water quality Bad for the hellbenders.

Kelly Griese:

In addition to the water quality being super important to their survival, what else do hellbenders need in their place of where they habitat or habitat, because I don't even think we've talked about what hellbenders eat. What do they eat? Hellbenders? Lasagna. They don't eat lasagna. They're not garfield they might eat lasagna.

Nick Burgmeier:

They sometimes are not as picky as we think they are. Um, and I know some some guys in captivity have thrown a chopped up hot dogs in with them and one creature does not eat.

Nick Burgmeier:

Hot dogs are delightful I in the wild hellbenders primarily eat crayfish. You know crawledads crawling around everywhere. They will also eat fish, lots of little bugs, pretty much anything. I mean they found rodent bones, I think some people found snakes inside of them. So it's primarily crayfish and things that move around. But they'll take care and fishermen catch them, especially cat fishermen.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

For a second there you were going like fishermen. I was like whoa, that's scary.

Nick Burgmeier:

I did meet a fisherman one time that said he caught a hellbender once that was he said. His specific words were it was as big as a man.

Kelly Griese:

It was this big. That feels like one of those stories that fishermen tell. You know, just, and every time they tell the story, the fish or the hellbender in this case gets bigger.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I feel if the hellbender is as big as a man, then that would actually make it the largest salamander in the world, because the largest one was a small person.

Nick Burgmeier:

Yeah, depending on the size of the man.

Kelly Griese:

I would be so delighted to find a salamander the size of, like you know, the size of Nick. Could we, could we, find a hellbender that's as big as you? I don't think you could find a hellbender.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Is there a hellbender onesie you could wear? Do you actually? This is a legitimate question Do you have a hellbender onesie?

Nick Burgmeier:

I do not have a hellbender onesie. Why not this is?

Dr. Monni Böhm:

something. This is the marketing opportunities here.

Kelly Griese:

I do have a giant hellbender mascot costume but I don't wear it around my house and you didn't wear it here to meet us.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I feel you shouldn't wear that around the house, just only outside where people can see you.

Kelly Griese:

Missed opportunity not wearing it here today to talk with Mani and I, because that would have been so delightful. We're definitely going to link people to your social media accounts. It's Help. The Hellbender right Is the social media, so there are pictures of the the Hellbender mascot the man-sized Hellbender mascot, herbie the Hellbender Herbie the Hellbender. What a great name for a Hellbender.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

That's brilliant, although, obviously, why not?

Kelly Griese:

Hermione, oh, hermione the Hellbender. I mean, that brings up a good question Are hellbenders sexually dimorphic? When you look at them, can you tell which one's a boy and which one's a girl?

Nick Burgmeier:

80 to 90% of the time. No, so most of the year, when hellbenders aren't in breeding condition, the males and the females look exactly the same. The only way you can tell them apart is either by ultrasound to see if you can see any developing follicles, any eggs inside, or you can do a genetic test on them and you can tell the difference. That way, the only time you can actually look at a hellbender and tell if it's male or female is a short period of time in like late August through early October, where the male's cloaca swells and this is during the breeding season and that's pretty typical of a lot of salamanders is the male's cloaca will swell during the breeding season and that you pick one up and it's pretty obvious male, female, but outside of that season can't tell them apart.

Kelly Griese:

Okay, so we don't know for sure if the mascot is Herbie or Hermione is what we're saying. Maybe it depends on who's wearing the suit.

Nick Burgmeier:

Ooh, that could be, and you know we have had it at this point for probably 10 years and we've never seen any cloacal swelling, so it might just be a female.

Kelly Griese:

Might just be Hermione, definitely female. We should advocate for a name change for the hellbender mascot. I think that'd be lovely. We talked a little bit about river health, so we should get back on some seriousness. We talked a little bit about river health here in Indiana. Any signs of improvement? Because you said that there might be some additional places other than the Blue River where we could potentially see hellbenders again in the future.

Nick Burgmeier:

Yeah, so overall in Indiana, indiana as a whole does not get great grades on its river health particularly. I mean it's a heavily agricultural state. There's a lot of livestock in that, so it gets pretty poor grades for nutrients and E coli in the river. But down where I am Washington, harrison, crawford counties in the Blue River it generally has been getting better and better over the last several decades. The soil and water conservation districts in those areas and the Natural Resources Conservation Service in those areas. They are very active with our farming community and they have a lot of programs for landowners to get conservation on the ground to help retain soil and reduce runoff all the things that would improve water quality. And so since they have been so active over the last several decades, it's really helped in those areas.

Kelly Griese:

That's great. I like hearing that are getting involved in that process of helping to improve our river health and, hopefully, all the other wet spaces that Monty is responsible for as our freshwater conservation coordinator at the Global Center.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Don't say I'm responsible for all of the wet spaces. You know how much pressure I put on me every single day, but I feel this is a really important segue into our next thing that we want to talk to Nick about, because of course, it's not just Nick who helps the hellbenders.

Kelly Griese:

Indeed not. You have helped some hellbenders, Moni, and so have I.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I helped about two hellbenders Woo me. But, of course, one of the reasons we wanted to talk to you today, nick, is because you lead this incredible partnership that the Indianapolis Zoo is part of. Help the Hellbenders we already mentioned it Herbie or Hermione or Hillary, or whatever you want to call the hellbender, I can't come up with any more. Heather, oh, beautiful. Heather, the hellbender, that's beautiful. Um, tell us a little bit about this partnership and all your different partners and what you're doing so how you heard the cats?

Kelly Griese:

what are you doing?

Dr. Monni Böhm:

what are you doing, nick? What are you doing every day?

Nick Burgmeier:

so just a real, explain your existence to us. A brief history of of the project as a whole is that way back in 2006, 2007.

Nick Burgmeier:

So long ago yeah very long I was barely graduated from undergrad the Indiana DNR approached Dr Rod Williams at Purdue University to see if he could help figure out what's wrong with the hellbender. And so for the first maybe five or six years it was a lot of research, a lot of water quality and health of the actual hellbenders that we found and what the population was. But you know that only once you learn that information you know what are you going to do with it. And what Rod at that point settled on was well, you know, maybe we should do some experimental releases. And so he did that and they did OK, they had decent survival. But he wanted to see can we do, can we really scale this up? And that's really what led into Help.

Nick Burgmeier:

The Hellbender was because he realized if we were going to scale this up you know this isn't something that purdue university can do on its own uh, so he started working with, I think at the very beginning, at the very front end it was, it was fort wayne children's zoo and musker park zoo, and then, as that sort of developed, we pulled in some other zoos indianapolis zoo, columbian park zoo and also all these other partners, the, the Nature Conservancy, which they actually were pretty close to the front end as well.

Nick Burgmeier:

The Nature Conservancy was, but all these local soil and water conservation districts and Indian Department of Environmental Management, the DNR was already a part of it and so that partnership just expanded for Help the Hellbender. And then that sort of formed a splinter group which was a program through the NRCS which is called Farmers Helping Hellbenders, which started bringing in more partners from what we would not traditionally think would be hellbender partners. So groups like local cattlemen's associations and Purdue Extension, some livestock research groups and again other partners like the Nature Conservancy and the zoos are also a part of the Farmers Helping Hellbenders and that program was focused specifically on protecting the landscape around the Blue River in that area to further help the hellbenders. So it was really this big program focused on restoring hellbender populations and restoring the habitat.

Kelly Griese:

And we here at the Indianapolis Zoo are part of the rearing of those hellbenders here at the Indianapolis Zoo are part of the rearing of those hellbenders. So our Global Center office for those of you who've not been to the zoo and seen us, because there's these big windows that you can watch us work it's really creepy here at the Indianapolis.

Nick Burgmeier:

Zoo it's also not very exciting.

Kelly Griese:

We're not exciting to watch.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Unless we do chair ballet.

Kelly Griese:

We do sometimes do chair ballet. We here in the Global Center, though, we share a wall with some 200 hellbenders. They are very polite neighbors, very polite, but soon they'll be moving to a much bigger pad. That's happening this summer. We're going to be releasing our captive reared salamanders here at the Neenah Apple Zoo, back into the wild, so can you talk to us a little bit about what a release day looks like for hellbenders?

Nick Burgmeier:

Yeah, so a release day that usually involves my coworker, one of or a couple of my coworkers, they, they. We have this special truck you can name drop them it's fine.

Nick Burgmeier:

Oh, sherry Reinsch, in the past it was Shelby Royal. We have this, this specialized truck that's got an electrical system and tanks in it and chillers so we can transport hellbenders all the way across the state and they stay cool and they stay comfortable. But she'll get up early with her technicians to load up these hellbenders. This year they'll come to Indianapolis Zoo. They'll load up hellbenders in Indianapolis Zoo and then her and whoever has decided they want to come to this release will caravan down to southern Indiana, usually somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, and they'll meet me and I have set up a release site which basically involves putting a bunch of a cage in the river with a bunch of rocks in the cage and that's called a cobble bed.

Nick Burgmeier:

So that's what we'll actually release the hellbenders into. And it's got a separate cage over top of it which we can put on. It's just temporary, put on and take off. And all these people will carry buckets of hellbenders out into the river. They'll release them into this temporary cage and then they're. That's called a soft release, so they're not free to go at that point. They sit in that cage in the river for several days and acclimate to their conditions and then after about three days we take that outer cage off from over top the cobble bed and then they can move about the river and they're free to live their lives.

Kelly Griese:

I recall you saying that because you track them, they have trackers in them, correct?

Nick Burgmeier:

Some of them have.

Kelly Griese:

Some of them have trackers and I believe you've told us at some of the previous release events that some will literally stay right next to that soft release cage for the rest of their lives. Others are like I'm going to take a little adventure and go exploring. So what does that look like? How much do hellbenders actually move within a river?

Nick Burgmeier:

So that's taken a little bit of tweaking. When we first did our first releases, we were actually trying to compare what happens if you release them in the fall versus release them in the summer, and what we found were those fall animals. They stay in the cage for almost five to six months. They don't do anything over winter. So we did that release in November and once, maybe April, rolled around. The water's high, but that is when hellbenders really start moving around in the river after winter and they started getting close to the riverbanks. So they got out of that high water, went to the riverbanks and a lot of those ended up getting eaten by raccoons oh no. Or they went really far downstream oh no weeks. And then when they moved out of the cages they stayed in the center of the river and they established habitat relatively nearby.

Nick Burgmeier:

Most of those animals their longest move. I think we had one that moved maybe a mile or so, which was long, but the rest of them kind of stuck around within a few hundred meters. And that's what we want. We want them to establish in these areas where we're releasing them, and what we think was happening was those animals that we released in the fall and they didn't ever come out of the cage. So when they did and the water was high, they're like well, we don't like this at all. So they just moved over to the riverbanks where the flow was lower, and that's where the raccoons were waiting for them.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

So now that you're releasing in like at a different time, that's good news for the hellbenders, bad news for the raccoons?

Nick Burgmeier:

yes, really, yeah, I mean we put cameras on our cages and we could literally see, or we could literally see raccoons hanging out on the banks just staring, staring out there at the river yep waiting for it they're like oh look, nick's here with our, with our meal.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

How nice of him he brought takeout meal to kind of get to us. But sure, yeah, it's's a mere nonetheless, they're patients apparently. So they have tags, but how in practice does it look like when you track a hellbender so that our listeners can picture that?

Nick Burgmeier:

So these tags give off a radio signal which we pick up with a big antenna that has, I mean, it's like two feet long. It's got these big metal posts that stick out the sides. So you see these, you know these weird biologists walking around through the river.

Kelly Griese:

Weirdos.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

That's precisely the description I wanted to say Holding a metal antenna waving it around in the air.

Nick Burgmeier:

And I mean we follow throughout the year, so you might see it in the middle of the summer, when it's 90 degrees, or you might see it in the middle of the summer when it's 90 degrees, or you might see it in the middle of winter, when the river's iced over and it's 20 degrees, but we are wandering around there all times of the year.

Kelly Griese:

I've seen these antennas and they very much look like the old school antennas that were on top of houses to pick up signal. It's pretty much the exact same thing, just slightly smaller.

Nick Burgmeier:

Just slightly smaller.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

During my PhD I used to radio track badges at night and one time we tracked next to a old mansion that was in the UK and they had a ghost hunting event in said mansion and one of the ghost hunters actually came out into the grounds and he kind of sidled up to me in, to be quite honest, a bit of a creepy way. I was like what are you doing? I'm looking for ghosts. And he looked at me and was like, are you looking for ghosts? And I was like sure, it's probably easier than explaining to you that I'm tracking badgers. But also it was yeah, we did talk about badgers.

Kelly Griese:

We're going to need to do a full badger episode one day for Monty. It was literally the creepiest. The creepiest thing ever.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Um, money has a background, he told me where all the outside of the mansion um ghost sightings were, and that's where I had to track the next night and I had freaked myself out did you find any ghosts? Just fishermen, to be quite honest. And guess what badgers? Congratulations, I know I've done really well but I thought he's never, seen a badger, but he's never seen a badger.

Kelly Griese:

He's never seen a badger, oh.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I've never seen a badger in a while. The European badgers, the ones that invite you around for tea, not the ones that beat you up in an alley. This podcast is a production of the Global Center for Species Survival at the Indianapolis Zoo. We record all episodes in the Beadle Financial Media Studio, made possible by a generous gift from Eric and Elaine Beadle. What were we talking about? We're not talking about hellbenders. We were talking about hellbenders and lasagna Allegheny alligators.

Kelly Griese:

Let's go back to that. So many delightful names. I'm just wondering do you have any interesting stories, Because you talked a little bit about landowners and farmers? There's so many different partners involved in this process of getting out there. So any good stories from the field that you, any anecdotes that you'd like to share?

Nick Burgmeier:

I have a fun story from Indianapolis Zoo. Actually, when they were out with me Excellent, let's do it. So Indianapolis Zoo used to have a program where some of their some of their employees would bring down high school students to to come to me and I would show them stuff about how to work with hellbenders. I would do water quality work with them and they happened to come out one time when I had not yet been out in the river so this was the first time I'd been out in the river for the year and we were canoeing downstream and they had gotten two of the Indianapolis Zoo employees that got slightly ahead of me and they yelled back at a point where there's normally a left turn, slightly ahead of me and they yelled back at a point where there's normally a left turn and a right turn and they said which way do we go? I said go to the right and they said all the way to the right. I was like, well, yeah, there's sure go all the way to the right.

Nick Burgmeier:

And as I pulled up there they were stuck. They were out of their canoes, struggling mightily against the water that had pushed them under an island that had formed just sometime over the last few months and basically we just had to tug this canoe, which was almost wrecked uh, out of here and I felt bad because I had just sent the indapolis Zoo employees into an undertow. That same spot actually cost us several thousand dollars. Just about a month later, when my techs were out there working and they got their boat stuck under it, but they had radio telemetry receivers and it stole those from us and they're not waterproof.

Kelly Griese:

So are beavers to blame. Should we blame the beavers? This is the might of the river and the're not waterproof.

Nick Burgmeier:

Are beavers to blame? Should we blame the beavers? No, this is the might of the river and the changes over winter.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

It's all the way to the right that we have to blame.

Nick Burgmeier:

But the landowners right there. They said that island is now gone so the river has washed it away. They said they would just sit out there and watch people wreck their boats and it was kind of a fun thing for them to do. Sit on their board.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Nice thing to do in the afternoon, yeah sure. Have a beer.

Kelly Griese:

Sit there and watch people wreck their boats? Yep, absolutely.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

So, with big, huge partnerships like this, getting all those different people on board must be a lot of herding of people, right? What are, like, the best things about such a big partnership and what are some of the more I don't want to use annoying, but the more challenging parts of such a partnership?

Nick Burgmeier:

Well, I mean the best part about the partnerships? Well, one is it helps us accomplish our goal because we're definitely not doing it on our own. We can't raise all these hellbenders or meet all these landowners and get all this conservation on the ground. But we also I mean we've really expanded. We were just a handful of biologists running around saving hellbenders. Now we work with farmers, we work with zookeepers, we work with communication specialists all these different types of people that you know. We're broadening our horizons and we're learning new things. So that's really exciting and it definitely makes the project much more successful.

Nick Burgmeier:

I guess the most challenging thing would be sort of getting all those different groups together in one coherent fashion to accomplish a goal. But that's the herding cats analogy, yes, hence the herding cats, because you know farmers and the conservationists that work for farmers don't necessarily always they're not as familiar with the biology world and the captive husbandry world as we are, and so sometimes those things you know well, we need to release hellbenders here and we need to. We need to protect this farm ground here, and that's a little counterintuitive, especially to farmers, like we need to turn this farm ground into trees, and so that's a little tough but a lot of the farmers have bought into the idea that, well, we know this protects our soil and it protects our riverbank, so it's good for them in the long run and it's good for hellbenders.

Kelly Griese:

If I am not a farmer, I am not someone who lives along a riverbank or especially the Blue River. I don't have lots of money to give to conservation issues, to help hellbenders in that way. What can I do? What can I do to help hellbenders? To help hellbenders in that way.

Nick Burgmeier:

What can I do? What can I do to help hellbenders? So, just for the average landowner, pretty much anything that protects water quality. So and those are that can be as simple as properly disposing of your pharmaceuticals, so a lot of people just like the flushing down the toilet. That stuff frequently does not get filtered out in public waste treatment so it ends up in rivers and streams and you can take those to usually like your local CVS or your local drugstore, not overusing fertilizers or chemicals in your gardens or your flower beds, because that stuff, especially in a town, runs off, frequently just goes into a storm drain and most of that storm wastewater isn't treated. It varies. There are some places where wastewater is treated, but in most places that stuff just ends up in the stream.

Nick Burgmeier:

All bad stuff for hellbenders and those are relatively simple things. You just don't do them. Some more active things you can do if you live in a city and you do know well, this part of my yard gets wet, it runs into the road. You can do things like plant rain gardens, which are basically just moisture adapted gardens. It can be pretty flowers and that helps filter that runoff. It helps increase the penetration of the water into the ground, so not as much of it gets into the system. I mean, that's just a relatively simple.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

If you like flowers and gardening, it's a relatively simple thing to do I do it all sounds like relatively straightforward things to do. It is yeah, and those are things that are really practical.

Kelly Griese:

I think that anyone can do so, even if you don't own property. You know, like you said, the pharmaceuticals or the other thing I think is being good stewards when we are out enjoying nature spaces. I know that some people like to build those cairns with rocks and stuff like that, but that can be disturbing to habitats. If you're out, you know, in nature, maybe just leave nature as it is.

Nick Burgmeier:

Yeah, the cairns are a big issue, especially in the southeast where they still have really good hellbender streams, and those streams oftentimes run through pretty well-attended parks and so you know, there'll be a parking lot and a picnic area right next to a prime breeding habitat for hellbenders.

Nick Burgmeier:

And most people don't think well, I'm just moving some rocks. But I've gone to those places and I've only seen a few of them. They complain about them all the time down in the southeast, where there'll be hundreds and hundreds of these rock stacks and what happens in the stream is you're moving these rocks A lot of the times they'll find dead hellbenders because you've crushed the hellbenders. When you're moving the rock, they'll find dead hellbenders because you've crushed the hellbenders. When you're moving the rock, it slips and and it smashes the animal, but it also removes that habitat from the stream. So you've you've sort of reduced the habitat or you've damaged a nest or you've damaged an actual hellbender and and it's not uncommon to find dead hellbenders in those areas I have learned today that we shouldn't stack rocks number one because we just talked about that.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I mean, admittedly you started that, so you had to learn it beforehand.

Kelly Griese:

But you know, sharing knowledge, knowledge is power that we shouldn't flush pharmaceuticals. Let's see what else did I learn today Rain, gardens, rain gardens are lovely Pretty flowers. They're pretty and they're beneficial too. What did you learn today, Moni?

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I mean, I learned a ton of different names for the hellbender.

Kelly Griese:

So many names.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

That's kind of. Do you have a favorite name? Nick?

Nick Burgmeier:

for hellbenders. I'm partial to snot otter.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

I mean snot otter is the best, it's very descriptive and it's pretty fun.

Nick Burgmeier:

and it's pretty fun.

Kelly Griese:

Not otters, and I don't think they have, you know, the same kind of mucusy noses that we do, necessarily, I don't know, do they blow their noses?

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Who hellbenders, otters or us? I'm not entirely sure where this conversation is going. I don't know. I don't know.

Kelly Griese:

Do you need a tissue Moni?

Dr. Monni Böhm:

No, I'm good. Thanks For now. I I'm good. Thanks for now, I'm good. Yeah, no, my favorite one is definitely Snot Otter, because that's very descriptive and a little bit grim and I like those names, and lasagna sides always makes me slightly hungry, to be quite honest.

Kelly Griese:

Yeah, it's near lunchtime, so maybe we'll have to go get some lasagna after this. I don't know.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

But I mean overall the other thing that I obviously I learned other things as well, apart from just focusing on the fun names, um and I think that's um a lot of the stuff that you just mentioned, nick, that we can all do to help the hellbenders. What's really exciting about those things is that those are things that actually help a ton of other critters as well in our fresh waters.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

So you know, if you help the hellbenders, you help a lot of other species as well and, to be quite honest, just generally, our freshwater systems, which we all like clean water, right.

Nick Burgmeier:

Right, and that's one of the things with the farmers helping hellbenders that we really wanted to focus on was. You know, the goal is to improve water quality, but we're also helping farmers with soil retention and topsoil helps keep their land productive. Soil retention and topsoil helps keep their land productive. But when we build these buffers, these riparian buffers or these pollinator areas, it helps things. I mean it helps pollinators, it helps upland game birds, it helps songbirds, it helps basically all of the riparian species, all the animals that live along the stream. It's beneficial to them. So it's not just hellbenders, it's hellbenders and deer and turkey and butterflies and muscles and fish and people, All the things.

Kelly Griese:

All the things I want to help, all the things Monty has, a lot of things she needs to help as our wetlands person, which we've already emphasized, makes you very nervous.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Again, I feel immense pressure during this podcast recording.

Kelly Griese:

Not helping.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Not helping Monty is a delight, and accomplishing so very much though and yet it feels like so very little okay, oh, now we've gone down a really it's getting dark, really dark avenue think about the snot otter think about the snot otter, think about lasagna.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

That's there, you. That should make you smile. And she's back in the room, Right? No, I mean wonderful for you to visit us today, Nick. I love the Hellbender project. I'm so excited that our baby Hellbenders next door are going to go and get released into the big wide world or well, Southern Indiana at least and I'm really excited to see what's coming next for this wonderful partnership and how the releases go. Obviously, this summer it's going to be super exciting.

Kelly Griese:

And we will make sure that we share that. We will be sharing some pictures and videos of our lovely, sweet Indianapolis Zoo hellbenders when they return to the wild. We're so excited for that to happen and excited to see you again this summer when that happens.

Nick Burgmeier:

The releases are one of our most exciting times of the year, and this year we're releasing like 350 Hellbenders, so there'll be a lot more Hellbenders out there.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

And that, I think, is a much higher number than any of the years before right.

Nick Burgmeier:

Yeah, so we started releasing Hellbenders in 2017. And between 2017 and 2023, we've released 514 Hellbenders, but this summer we'll release I think it's 352. So we're.

Kelly Griese:

It's not a competition, but we're winning. We're winning.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Release your top triumph.

Kelly Griese:

I think we should end on that positive note.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Yeah, I get really kind of big stares from our producer Adam.

Kelly Griese:

Adam is filling in as producer today, since I am co-hosting in place of Justin.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

We're just musical chairs, musical chairs today and he's giving me big stares because he was just telling me wrap it up. I started wrapping up and then I asked another question. So there you go. Well done, adam. I ignored you. Thank you, nick Cool. Thank you very much, nick. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Nick Burgmeier:

Thank you, Nick Cool.

Dr. Monni Böhm:

Thank you very much, nick. Yeah, thanks for having me. I feel we'll put the website links and stuff in the show notes so that everybody can find out more about this wonderful project. Absolutely, thank you. Don't forget to subscribe to the Protect Species podcast to ensure you're the first to know when new episodes are available, and please follow us on social media. We're on Facebook, instagram and X Also, if you like what you hear. We'd love if you left us a review, which apparently makes us more popular. That's all I ever wanted and also obviously helps people find us. Thank you.

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