Not ‘Hellraiser’, FFS – ‘hellbender’
Here’s one by my new PhD student, Leah Collett:
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I have never heard of the hellbender before. “Brilliant name”, I thought. Then I saw it mentioned again a few days later, in company with honey badgers and blue-footed boobies, in a recent article on why we need to see nature as useless in order to ‘save’ it.
So what is it? The hellbender is a species of salamander found in eastern North America, the only species of its genus it turns out, and one of only three left in its family (Cryptobranchidae – ‘hidden gills’). It is assessed as Near Threatened with possible extinction in the near future by the IUCN Red List. Along with the, sadly all too often, habitat degradation it is suffering due to it being highly sensitive to environmental change, it is still believed to be poisonous and that it will kill other fish and their eggs with this poison. In this day and age, some people will kill these salamanders when they come across them when they are out fishing, due to inaccurate held beliefs. I think I found it more incredible that this still occurs in a country where people have quick access to research and information denouncing such a myth.
This wonderful document on the biology and ecology of the hellbenders includes a section titled ‘Man and Hellbenders’ and highlights the likely culprit for starting the ‘hellbenders are poisonous – kill them all’ campaign:
“Dr N. Bayard Green (1971) related how a former editor of the Pocahontas Times (Pocahontas, West Virginia) in 1926 continually tried to vilify the hellbender as a destroyer of game fish and their eggs. Throughout West Virginia many sportsmen’s groups attempted to eradicate many of the so-called enemies of fish and game.”
(I could not read the original paper of Dr Green’s, although it might be available in the collections section). Read the rest of this entry »
ConservationBytes.com 