In the Chattanooga Zoo, there is a little old place where hellbenders can get together. The amphibian breeding room, affectionately known as the “Love Shack,” houses a state-of-the-art, 40-foot artificial hellbender stream that has been built in hopes of breeding hellbenders in captivity.
“The species have only been bred once. People have been trying to do it for 15 years and there was finally a breakthrough,” says David Hedrick, lead ectotherm keeper at the Chattanooga Zoo. We are part of the body and collective that is trying to help find the variables to breed these in captivity.”
David HedrickThe importance of learning how to breed hellbenders rests in the severe decline in populations primarily due to siltation, but also because of the cumulative effect of dams, pollution and agricultural herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers. “It’s rough. There are streams that had large numbers of them 20 years ago and now there are hardly any of them,” says Hedrick. “If we can nail this technology down, a few years down the road it could help us determine if we can release captively bred animals back in the wild. We can replace the species in certain areas.”
The Zoo, in partnership with Lee University and Dr. Michael Freake, associate professor of biology at Lee University, conducts field work and collects important data on hellbenders, such as genetic samples and population surveys. This season, they will be doing new research – collecting water samples, straining them and analyzing the DNA samples left behind.
“You can literally detect the presence of hellbenders by taking samples of the water,” says Hedrick. “It’s pretty insane.”