Posted: 9/7/2012 7:34:56 PM EDT
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Have you ever seen a hellbender?
They look very cool |
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are they the same thing as a snot otter? I think this is a snot otter http://www.herpsofnc.org/herps_of_nc/salamanders/Necmac/Nec_mac.html |
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Found them when we were kids. They were IIRC huge and hid under large flat rocks. Up in the stream of Western MD. Same here. Used to run around the cricks in Frostburg and catch them and minnows and crawdads. The salamanders were never bigger than a finger though. |
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Never seen one in person. They're heavily protected in my area. Why? Come to Texas and buy some in the bait shop. We call them waterdogs. Those aren't hellbenders. Most of the time the ones sold as bait are larval tiger salamanders. Possibly, I've never heard the term "Hellbender" till this thread. |
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Never seen one in person. They're heavily protected in my area. Why? Come to Texas and buy some in the bait shop. We call them waterdogs. Those aren't hellbenders. Most of the time the ones sold as bait are larval tiger salamanders. Possibly, I've never heard the term "Hellbender" till this thread. They're a species of salamander restricted to quick moving streams in the east. They are the largest North American salamander, and can get up to 24" long. |
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I've seen one only once. When I was a boy (in the '80's), I was fishing with my father on the Roaring River in TN. As we finishd up fishing for the day and walking back to the car, my father stopped over a deep pool and pointed out a Hellbender that was on the bottom.
James |
| my parents farm in PA has a spring fed creek on it that is chock full of the things. When my older sisters were in high school there were many times that the biology teacher would bring the class to our farm to examine them as you aren't allowed to catch them for captivity (or something like that). They are completely harmless and when the crayfish population gets big, they get really big, like foot and a half big and a good couple of pounds. There was a couple of researchers that came out in the mid 90's to figure out why our stream had so many an it turns out that because the farm is on the side of a mountain with a bog on top, all the rainwater gets highly filtered before it gets to the water table. There is also no houses, or farms upstream so all the water is extremely clean. Turns out salamanders are very good indicator of overall water purity. |
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One of my friends did his thesis research on hellbenders. I spent a weekend at his site helping him find them once.
It was a swift, shallow river with lots of large flat rocks. We would spotlight them at night when they were poking their heads out from under the rocks, then lift the rocks with a log peavey. I think we only managed to capture one that weekend, but he caught upwards of thirty different individuals over the course of his study. Interestingly, he found ~75% of the ones that had been tagged in a prior study 11 years before. The biggest was 53 cm. Also interesting was that the average growth over that 11 year period was <2 cm. National Geographic actually sent photographers down to spend a weekend photographing them, but I don't think it was ever published. |
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We call them water dogs and would catch them fishing the Kanawha River. Those were probably mudpuppies. They're pretty common in the Kanawha and it's not very good hellbender habitat. Eta: The Japanese Giant Salamander, their hellbender equivalent, is awesome. 
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