Join Ben Prater, Southeast Program Director, and our partners in surveying for Hellbenders in Western North Carolina. Learn about new technology Defenders is deploying in the field to detect and inventory for Hellbenders and other animals. Learn more at https://dfnd.us/hellbender.
Video Transcript:
I’m Ben Prater, Southeast program director for Defenders of Wildlife.
And today we’re here in Western North Carolina, at a beautiful hotspot for the Eastern Hellbender, one of the world’s largest salamanders, and one of the coolest salamanders we have here in the Appalachians – doing some inventories and surveys, really just to kind of help give us a pulse check on the health of the population so we can look for trends, whether we’re seeing indications of disease, any drops in the population or other positive signs. Maybe we’ll see juvenile animals and things of the like.
So one of the challenges we have as an organization working on rare species is that oftentimes much of what we know about these critters is kind of hard to discover because their numbers are limited.
So for years, the principle way that we were targeting efforts for Hellbenders was to come out and physically census for the animals and that is a little bit of a heavy-handed process.
So we have looked at other ways of increasing our chances of detecting Hellbenders in streams without having to do as much habitat disturbance.
So one of the first ways we addressed that was to develop artificial nest boxes. So similar to putting up a blue bird box in your yard or a Wood Duck box on your lake. These are boxes that that Hellbenders would use.
And because the location was known because it was something that we had put in place, we could easily go back to that location, study that animal and that use of that habitat.
And now one of the state of the art solutions that we’re using to detect both Hellbenders, but also any other animals in the stream, is through a process called eDNA.
And what that is is a survey method that takes water samples at discreet intervals or known locations and then that water sample is actually run through a set of analyses to quantify and decipher the amount of DNA that’s in the water column.
But nonetheless it gives us an immediate, very cost effective means by which to say yes, Hellbenders are present in these places without having to do that commensurate disturbance of habitat, so pretty exciting technology and we’re beginning to test it’s applications to go into areas that have either never been inventoried before or are kind of unknown and use that quick, easy method to determine.
It’s reducing the amount of man hours you’re putting out there and increasing the amount of efficiency that we need to do to get these conservation programs targeted where they belong.
