A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
The giant salamander called the hellbender has been put on a list of species that may soon be considered endangered. Now, when fully grown, it takes two hands to just even hold one. The hellbender, though, needs very clean water to survive, and that's getting harder to find. Kentucky Public Radio's Justin Hicks went to meet some hellbenders.
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JUSTIN HICKS, BYLINE: Here in Frankfort, Kentucky, Monte McGregor leads me into a three-car garage with giant water tanks. They're laid out in long rows, and all sorts of tubes go into them. This is a state-run nursery that breeds eastern hellbenders, and McGregor is an aquatic scientist. He points to a tank full of roughly footlong salamanders, and they're only teenagers.
MONTE MCGREGOR: These are juveniles. They're about 14 months old. They like to swim with their tail. They have a large tail, and you can actually see one swimming there.
HICKS: Now, hellbenders aren't conventionally cute. 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. And McGregor says, at a glance, some people assume they must be poisonous.
MCGREGOR: They're kind of slimy. People are scared of them, but they're really, really majestic creatures.
HICKS: Hellbenders can grow up to 2 1/2 feet long. They are native to many Appalachian states, and McGregor says 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. And clean, undisturbed streams have become something of a rarity.
MCGREGOR: 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 in their habitat, basically, or the polluted water. They're very sensitive. So we know they're there in some places, but they're pretty rare.
HICKS: So rare that last month, the federal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a proposal to officially declare them endangered. If the proposal goes through, hellbenders would be afforded protections under the Endangered Species Act. It could mean that 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 advocacy group, and she says the designation has been a long time coming.
TIERRA CURRY: I would say that hellbenders have been endangered. They just haven't gotten that recognition. We've petitioned for ESA protection for them back in 2010, so it's been 14 years to get them to the proposed state.
HICKS: Curry says 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. Then in September, Hurricane Helene happened.
CURRY: The rivers there rose to 20 and 30 feet high, and they carried hellbenders out into farm fields, onto roads, into debris piles.
HICKS: Curry expects the federal government to finalize the endangered status sometime next year. With a new administration coming in, her group will be watching closely.
CURRY: So if anything goes awry with that, it will be the result of political interference, and we will go back to court because this is not a species I'm ever going to give up on.
HICKS: In the meantime, those teenage salamanders McGregor is growing in his tanks are expected to be released into the wild next year.
For NPR News, I'm Justin Hicks in Frankfort, Kentucky.
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