- SHEFFIELD, Pa. -- They're out there, the myriad slimy or scaly creatures that are largely spurned by adults yet are spellbinding to youngsters. And here, in the great northwest woods of Pennsylvania, Art Hulse is tracking what may be the most gruesome and rarely seen of them all.
Hulse is grappling his way along a glide in a wide, shallow stream in the vast Allegheny National Forest. Minnows scoot at each footstep. Crayfish flee as he hefts huge rock after huge rock from the stream bed, hoping to keep the sediment clouds at a minimum so the superbly camouflaged beast he seeks does not escape unnoticed.
This is the lair of the hellbender, a salamander on steroids.
Suddenly, Hulse, a biology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, has a half-grown specimen in his hands and a smile on his face. He is holding an egg-laden female about 14
inches long and weighing about 1 pounds.
The hellbender is not destined to be a poster child in the campaign to stem the worldwide decline in amphibians and reptiles. That's because the word grotesque only understates the
rumpled physique of the specimen trying to slime itself from Hulse's grip. This is a species that could be mistaken for squashed roadkill. It has a flattened body that enables it to wedge between
smooth-bottomed boulders and the stream bottom. Its head, which contains hundreds of tiny, raspy teeth -- crayfish are a dietary mainstay -- is even flatter.
Only the four toes on each of its front feet and the five on each back foot display, with their greenish tinge, the slightest hint of an appealing hue. The rest of the hellbender looks pretty much
like an elongated and wrinkled mud pie.
"It's not exactly charismatic megafauna," Hulse says. "But for a salamander, it is 'mega.' OK, OK, it also looks dirty and ugly. But it is unique." And the hellbender is almost certainly in trouble, though no one knows for sure.
No one knows with any certainty the range, distribution and populations of most of Pennsylvania's 22 species of salamanders, 16 species of frogs and toads, four species of lizards,
and 20 species of snakes. Four of those species -- one salamander, one frog, and two types of turtles -- already are believed to have been wiped out in the state.
To fill in gaps in knowledge, the state this year has started a projected five-year survey that already has drawn 750 volunteers. They are combing the state's 46,000 square miles to provide
what biologists call "baseline basics." Using data that could be complete shortly after the turn of the century, future planners would be able to better determine safe environmental practices.
"How can you tell resource managers how to manage if they don't even know what the resource is?" said Hulse, who heads the survey, known as the Pennsylvania Herpetological Atlas Project.
The $35,000-a-year project is funded by the state's Wild Resource Conservation Fund, which draws almost all of its money from the sale of the "Conserve Wild Resources" license plates and
from checkoffs on state income-tax forms. Last year, the fund provided $400,000 for similar projects, down from a high of $1.2 million in the 1995-96 fiscal year. License-plate sales have declined year after year. And last year, only 41,430 people gave donations on their
income-tax forms. The average donation was $6.34.
A bill that unanimously passed the state House and is now before the Senate Appropriations Committee aims to provide the Wild Resource Conservation Fund with a more stable source
of money.
Under current laws, the conservation fund cannot receive money from the general-fund account, even though the state will have a projected $700 million surplus this year.
The House bill would give the conservation fund $600,000 this year. That is a small chunk of change compared with the $40 million that the state collected this year from the sales tax on
"nonconsumptive" wildlife-related purchases, such as backpacking, bird-watching and photography equipment. "If wildlife is a ward of the state, then it's the state's responsibility to make sure that wildlife is guaranteed protection," said Frank Felbaum, executive director of the conservation fund. "Too bad wildlife and native plants don't vote."
In the case of the hellbender, Hulse estimates that a species that has been around for at least 30 million years has vanished from 60 percent of its original range in Pennsylvania. Now it
is confined to about 35 streams in the Ohio and Susquehanna River drainages. It also has been found in some streams feeding the Tennessee River drainage area in the Southeast.
"I was amazed the first time I saw one," said Scott Blackburn, a zoologist with the Division of Natural Resources in West Virginia, where hellbenders have been found in about 10 streams. "They're just so prehistoric, so unreal." And so old. Hulse, one of a handful of scientists in the country researching the species, is 52.
“I would not be surprised,” he said, "if at times I have held creatures older than I am." And creatures almost as long as the average man's inseam.
Several years ago, Hulse corraled a specimen that measured 29 slippery inches from head to tail. He estimated its weight at eight pounds. But what he, Blackburn and Dan Feller, an ecologist with Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, fear is that the population is an older population unable to replenish its stock.
Maryland is now in the second year of a study to determine the size of its hellbender population, specimens of which have been found in only two rivers -- the Youghiogheny and a tributary to it, the Casselman. So far, 21 hellbenders have been captured in the Casselman, 19 of them adults.
"When you see a population with almost all older animals," Hulse noted, "that's clearly a population in decline."
But without more research, biologists will never know for sure. No one, for example, is thought to have ever found a hellbender in the larval stage. (The female lays up to 350 eggs in late summer and early fall.) What happens to the young and where they go between egg and adult is simply unknown, the three scientists say.
And the hellbender is hardly unique in the field of herpetology.
"There's just so much we don't yet know about many species of reptiles and amphibians," Hulse said. "It's only through surveys like this that we can even get an approximate handle on
the situation."
In this particular stream in northwestern Pennsylvania, Hulse has discovered, in four years of study, a population of about 250 hellbenders concentrated in one stretch of roughly 200 yards. No other stream in the state can boast such numbers, he said. Why they are found in such abundance along that one section of stream remains a mystery, he said.
“It's an answer I get tired of giving, but I have to: 'We just don't know yet,' " he said. "We need to find out how it all fits together."
Hulse likens the survey's importance to the purchase of a vehicle. "Start up a conversation with someone who's just bought a new car," he said. "Ask to look under the hood. Point out all the wires, and then ask if he'd mind if you tore out one of the little red ones. What kind of a reaction do you think you'd get? The car owner probably doesn't know what that red wire does, but he suspects it's
something vital.
"Shouldn't we afford the environment the same courtesy we apply to our cars?"
That reasoning draws agreement from Rick Koval, 37, of Plains, in Luzerne County, one of the volunteers for the survey. He has signed on to explore more than 4,000 square miles of the
state -- most volunteers are given blocks of eight to 10 square miles to survey from spring to fall -- and has already put 30,000 miles on his car in his field work. "Even if this project doesn't get any more money, I'm going to keep on gathering data," said Koval, who manages the radiology department at a health-care center.
"I get a lot from nature," Koval added. "This is just a way of giving something back."
For more information about the Pennsylvania Herpetological Atlas Project or to volunteer, contact Hulse, the project director, or April Claus, the field director, at Indiana University of
Pennsylvania, Department of Biology, Indiana, Pa. 15705. The phone number is 724-357-2279; the fax number is 724-357-6949. |
