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[piano intro] - Hi, there, I'm Frank Graff.

Saving a salamander only found in two North Carolina rivers.

A new look at butterflies, and protecting nesting sea turtles.

We're all about critters, next on Sci NC.

- [Announcer] Funding for Sci NC is provided by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

[bright upbeat music] ♪ - Hi again, and welcome to Sci NC.

The Neuse River waterdog is a unique salamander.

It's only found in the Neuse and the Tar Rivers, but development is threatening that.

And now scientists are surveying the river to find where the waterdog is thriving and how to save it.

[bright music] - They're adorable.

They're now a threatened species, but they're endemic to North Carolina in the Neuse River.

And it's something that not everyone has gotten to see before.

- There's a lot of excitement when we pull up the trap and there's one in there.

Not just because, oh my God, I'm seeing this awesome creature, but because this is a threatened species.

So when we see one, it's just all the more exciting because wow, it's around.

- [Frank] It only lives in sections of the Neuse and Tar Rivers and their tributaries that are in rural wooded areas.

You won't find it anywhere else in the world.

But when it's found, it's considered.

- I think they're really charismatic.

- I think they're charismatic.

- Once you see them, they're very charismatic.

- What was the code again?

- It's a male going into the breeding season.

So if you translate that to water temp, it's like 18 Celsius.

- [Frank] It is the Neuse River waterdog salamander.

Yep, those red gills fluttering in the water, the tiny legs, and what appears to be a smiling face, all make for a charismatic creature.

It's also a threatened species.

- Salamanders, because they have really permeable skin and they spend a lot of time, or at least portions of their life around the water, they're really affected by things like water quality.

And so if the water quality in a particular area begins to degrade, they're going to be one of the first species to respond to that.

'Cause they'll take in whatever toxins, whatever pollutants are in the environment, and that'll negatively affect their health.

- [Frank] Neuse River waterdogs have been studied on and off for the past 50 years.

- [Eric] 38 grams.

- Eric Teitsworth is the third generation of scientists to pick up the study.

- [Eric] When we actually catch a waterdog, we are taking some basic measurements; things like length, weight.

We're also marking them and taking photographs so that if we were to recapture an animal, we would know.

And recapturing animals gives us some information towards knowing how healthy the population is, how many individuals are actually out there.

We're also taking tissue samples so that we know how populations are connected to one another within their potential range, and sort of more broadly out from just what information are we getting from each salamander.

We're also trying to get information on the habitat where we're catching them.

What's different from this place where we've just caught two individuals versus somewhere like the main stem of the Neuse River, in Raleigh, where we're just not able to catch them anymore.

Is there something that's important about the habitat that's being reflected in where and where these things do and do not occur?

- Looking at this, I'm thinking moving water, pretty sheltered, there's a tree there.

This would probably be pretty decent habitat, I would- - Absolutely.

Yeah, this is great habitat.

This is kind of what you're looking for.

A place with a nice flowing current.

You have lots of structure inside the streams like I was mentioning before, where you have sticks and logs and leaf packs over here.

Places where the waterdogs can both hide as they're growing.

But then also you have places where they're able to lay their eggs, and that's crucially important, we think.

Photo 77 and 78.

[gentle music] - [Frank] The charismatic salamander is not only a threatened species, it's also what scientists call an indicator species.

It is sensitive to changes in the environment.

And when there's a disruption, it's one of the first species to disappear.

- Even if someone may not care about a salamander, if you think about it, they are very indicative of water quality.

So that's the stuff you're playing in, your kids are playing in, you might be drinking it.

And if they're declining due to something going wrong in the water, what does that say about the water quality around here?

- [Frank] Waterdogs spend their entire life in the water.

They can live for 20 years.

- It's sort of this accumulation of stressors, environmental contaminants that can cause damage and sort of effect reproduction, affect all of these things.

We're finding that they're not found in a lot of the locations that they were previously found, where there's now a lot of, again, what we call stressors.

So things that are coming into the water system, run off or all of these other things that could influence the water quality.

- [Frank] The project is monitoring 40 traps.

And while there's more study to be done.

[water flowing] One of the early findings is that heavy water runoff from urban areas poses one of the biggest threats to the Neuse River waterdog.

- The flow, the rate at which water is coming down in the stream or river is really important for waterdogs and for a lot of species.

So if we have a whole bunch of trees, a whole bunch of natural environment, the water that's running off from say, from a road or just from rainfall is kind of trickling into the system, right?

It's not causing some huge push of sedimentation and all these other things.

But once that area gets developed, we get this huge increase and there's all of this water that can come flushing down the system, and that can have a really negative effect on species.

- [Frank] Fast moving water either scours the stream bed or buries it in silt.

- So the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service has developed a recovery outline, which we'll then use as a template for recovery planning.

[gentle music] And we need to reduce threats, that's probably the biggest thing that humans can help do besides protecting land, is reducing threats.

And so that means reducing sediment going into the streams.

It means reducing the nutrients that go in the streams.

- Environments that have been more disturbed by development, or maybe excessive runoff going into the stream, that tends to wash out or even bury all of this structure in the stream that waterdogs really need to survive.

And when it's just becomes that sort of desolate sandy environment where there's much fewer places to hide, that seems like what's really the problem here.

- The Carolina gopher frog is another endangered creature only found in our state.

Producer Rossie Izlar shows us a unique effort to track the frog in order to save it.

- [Rossie] Meet the Carolina gopher frog.

It may not be prince charming, but it's endangered.

Frogs all over the world are in trouble.

Almost half of all amphibians, which include frogs, salamanders and caecilians are in decline.

And that's just the ones we know about.

- They're sensitive animals.

Their skin is very permeable.

So they're in contact with everything and any kind of contaminant in the environment.

It's absorbed right through their skin.

- [Rossie] Jeff Beane is North Carolina's resident expert on all things amphibian.

- I've always been interested in anything that's alive and frogs are alive.

- [Rossie] The Carolina gopher frog is still alive, but it's struggling.

- In North Carolina, the problems frogs are having is habitat loss.

And the frogs that are struggling here are in the habitat specialists like the gopher frog.

- [Rossie] Habitat specialists aren't like rats or cockroaches that can live anywhere.

They rely on specific ecosystems.

That's why the fate of the Carolina gopher frog is tied to the fate of longleaf pine forests, their only habitat in North Carolina.

- Throughout the entire Eastern United States, most of longleaf pine habitats disappeared.

[gentle music] It's been milled, developed for homes.

It's a habitat that's used a lot for agriculture.

So historically there were more than 30 populations of Carolina gopher frogs, and now we're down to only about six or seven.

- [Rossie] The remaining gopher frogs survive in small enclaves of longleaf pine forest in the sandhills and the Southeastern parts of the state.

- We wanna see this species recover in the wild.

- [Rossie] The team gives gopher frogs a boost during the most vulnerable time, the egg, tadpole, and froglets stage.

- There's a lot of predators, and they're all looking for prey, like little tiny frogs that are easy for them to eat.

Another right there, Chris.

We collect a portion of each egg mass, bring it back to the zoo.

We raise the tadpoles until they turn into small frogs.

And then we go back out with the Resources Commission, we release them.

[crickets chirping] - [Rossie] Though sometimes, they're not always ready to be released, but they get there.

- And so we're gonna give them a major, major chance at survival just by doing what we're doing.

- This is 40.0 - [Rossie] Data collection is a big part of this work.

before releasing the froglets, the team injects a tiny piece of colored plastic in their hind legs.

The color corresponds to the year they were released.

- So that information's really important for us because it lets us know the success of the program.

For example, it's been a dry spring and summer.

And so in a year or two, if we find these guys, we'll know whether or not they were able to survive that.

- [Rossie] The team also outfits some of the frogs with radio tracking belts.

Mike Martin, from the Wildlife Resources Commission goes out every evening during the release season to check on those frogs.

- When he's following them around, he's realizing that they're constantly being predated upon by fire ants.

So we've learned that in order for this program to be successful, we need to manage fire ants.

Sometimes we joke and we call 'em LBFs, little brown frogs.

Everyone wants to save a bright, beautiful colorful animal, but it doesn't matter to us what they look like.

The goal is we should be saving diversity, especially when we have species that are unique.

I'm not gonna say that reptiles and amphibians are more important than mammals or birds.

Although I would like to say that.

The truth of the matter is scientifically, every species is important, and we should be looking at all of them equally.

- [Rossie] But in order for gopher frogs to recover, the longleaf pine ecosystem has to be maintained.

- Frogs depend on habitat.

They have to have places to live and places to breed and not everything can live in concrete buildings and sidewalks, very few things can.

- Like salamanders and gopher frogs, butterflies are unique creatures.

They are certainly easier to spot, but chances are you have never seen these creatures like this.

Adrian Smith with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences shows us.

[gentle music] - This is an owl butterfly.

And what you're about to see is an extraordinary moment in it's life.

It hasn't yet flown.

In fact, it hasn't even flapped its wings yet.

It's hanging onto the chrysalis from which it emerged as an adult butterfly just hours before.

[bright music] ♪ It's common name, owl butterfly comes from this.

The two giant eye spots that give a shocking impression of the eyes of a much larger animal.

[bright music] That butterfly is from the tropical forests of Central America.

But it emerged from it's chrysalis and I filmed it flying here in North Carolina.

In this museum, we have a walk-in exhibit that we call our living conservatory.

- The point of this exhibit is to create an immersion for visitors to experience a tropical habitat where they feel that they are actually walking into the forest.

In this room, we have several living animals.

We have a sloth, we have several turtles in the center bed.

We have a snake, but our most numerous species we have in the room, are butterflies, of course.

As the butterflies come in, we pin them up to these strips and hang them inside of a climate-controlled emergence chamber.

So we get about 300 butterflies every other week shipped to the conservatory from Costa Rica, which the public can view from the outside.

These butterflies on top, they take a little longer for their pupation period.

So they're just now starting to come out as you can see in this blue morpho on top.

- Watching an adult butterfly emerge is mesmerizing, and it's a time lapse video sequence I've always wanted to film.

So I spent three days testing setups and eventually captured this sequence.

[gentle music] First out is a blue-frosted banner.

Once the adult squirms free of the pupal case, it hangs around, inflating it's body and it's wings by circulating fluids.

Next is a Heliconius longwing.

[bright music] ♪ And last, a monarch.

The conservatory is a place to experience these insects close up.

But even with the relatively slow wing flapping of butterflies, it's hard to appreciate what they're doing without a slow motion camera.

So here's a collection of sequences I captured by filming at 1300 and 3200 frames per second.

[bright music] These are two species of longwings in the genus Heliconius.

A thing I noticed about their flights is how actively they swing and move around their long abdomen when they get into the air.

Watch in this sequence, when the butterfly does a mid-air change of direction with a downbeat of the wings and an upswing of the abdomen.

This is one of the most iconic tropical butterflies, a blue morpho.

When this one lifts into the air, you might notice something a little strange, it's not alone.

It's dragging behind a mate, still coupled together.

A lot of insects do this flying around as an attached mating pair.

I've tried to capture this before while filming flies, but I could never get a good sequence.

So I was shocked to capture these.

It's incredible to me that only one of the butterflies does all the work in lifting their combined weight.

Here's a view of the brightly colored underside of the wing of a malachite.

Notice also the checkerboard eye patterning and the contrasting colors of the top side of the wing as it lifts off.

Finally, this Cattleheart waves its front legs around before springing into the air.

One of the best things about our living conservatory is it might be one of the only ones in the country that's totally free.

There's no admission charge to get in this museum, and there's none to get in that particular exhibit.

So be sure to stop in and visit with the butterflies.

- And now to one of North Carolina's favorite coastal resources, visitors, sea turtles.

Their nesting season runs from mid-May through mid-August.

Loggerhead sea turtles are the prime visitors, but sometimes green sea turtles, kemp's ridley sea turtles and leatherback sea turtles make their way up the beach as well.

"NC Culture Kids", part of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, has more.

- Hey, everyone, Emily here at Fort Fisher State Recreation Area.

I'm here just as the sun is rising over the Atlantic Ocean, checking out some loggerhead turtle nests.

I'm here with the parks to help monitor these nests and to find out why it's so important to protect these threatened species.

- [Camerawoman] That was great.

[bright upbeat music] ♪ - So with me, to show me more of the monitoring process is Park Superintendent Jeff.

So Jeff, I know this is a special time of year for the sea turtles.

Tell me what's going on right now.

- Okay, well, right here behind us, you can see we've put this runway up on this nest 'cause it's actually getting ready to hatch.

Once the nest reach day 50 that the eggs have been in the ground, we'll put this runway up.

It kinda just gives the turtles a good start to get to the ocean.

- Yeah, what happens to those baby turtles or those eggs between the nesting and their way into the ocean?

- Well, they have a lot of predators just here on the beach.

So even before they get to the water, the main ones are fox and coyote.

Very much more with the coyote now.

There's ghost crabs, they'll go in there and try to pull out eggs or even baby sea turtles.

And then birds, birds will obviously fly down and grab a sea turtle if they can.

Which makes it, well it's very important for our volunteers who are out here to help monitor these nest and keep those predators away.

- Well, it's awesome that you mentioned that 'cause I made my way into the volunteer list for tonight and I'm gonna get to monitor some sea turtle nests and I'm really excited, I can't wait.

- Yeah, good luck.

I hope you guys get to see a hatch tonight.

That's really cool.

[gentle playful music] ♪ - There, I think he's alive.

- Oh my goodness.

- Yep.

Wow, hi.

There he is.

That's a live turtle, he was making his way out and we brought him up and now we're gonna get to take him to the ocean.

You're so cute.

- [Ranger] We'll see if there's any more in this nest.

And then if there's more, we'll release all of them.

- Cool, there you go.

[gentle playful music] ♪ - [Ranger] How do you feel right now, Emily?

- I don't know, man, this is incredible.

It is so awesome to see his little legs moving.

That's right, it's awesome to see his little flippers moving.

It's really cool how the flippers move so much and it's the shell is just kind of stationary.

You can feel his head kind of bobbing back and forth.

Yeah, let's get him to the ocean.

- [Ranger] We'll put him back in the bucket.

- Put him back in the bucket, there you go.

- Just calms down just a little bit.

You wanna carry the bucket?

- Yes I do, okay.

So he's going in, where he'll swim.

- Side of the sea, you wanna take him out of the bucket and just set him right on the sand.

[waves crushing] ♪ - He's working so hard in those back legs.

He's going pach kach kach.

[Ranger and Emily chattering] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Swim, swim, swim, swim, swim, swim.

Yay!

[bright trumpet music] There he goes.

So in the span of five years, loggerhead sea turtles grow from little baby hatchlings to over 200 pounds.

They eat things like clams, jellyfish, and this horseshoe crab right here, phew boy.

But sometimes they also eat stuff like balloons because they look like the jellyfish that they really wanna eat.

So one way that we can help the parks and help the sea turtles out is by collecting trash so it doesn't get into the ocean, and by making sure that balloons don't make their way either.

- So we notice the indentation in the sand right at 7:30.

- [Emily] Yeah.

- [Sean] So right now it's nine o'clock.

So an hour and a half later.

And this is really a mad dash.

They've hatched, they've waited for their siblings to all hatch and then they boil out then making their way all at once towards the ocean.

- [Emily] All their brothers and sisters at the same time.

- Somehow they are just making their way to the ocean with the little light that's out here.

They can see light reflecting off the horizon and they just instinctively know to head towards the ocean.

And it was just amazing to think if from a hundred turtles, it would be lucky if one survives, to come back and and lay eggs on the beach.

Well, I hope some of them go on to live a hundred years and lay thousands of eggs.

- Wow, it has been an incredible day here at Fort Fisher State Recreation Area.

We started just before the sun rose over the Atlantic Ocean monitoring these nests.

We've spent the day excavating nests and taking a look at some empty shells, taking a look at the cycle and the process of how these turtles make their way up to shore, lay their eggs and how the eggs eventually hatch.

And now we're finishing off the night with an incredible scene, watching a nest boil and baby sea turtles coming out and making their way out into the ocean where they'll live a long happy life.

So all in all, I would say today has been a huge success.

It's been great.

- [Camerawoman] All right, Emily, whenever you are ready.

- All right, so real quick, I'm here at.

Woooo, should get a shot of me running after the birds.

We'll do it a few times.

Turn on my brain.

Woo, thanks, horseshoe crab.

You're stinky, but we love you.

[Sean laughs] Come on, turtle.

[chuckles] He's so cute, look at him wiggle.

Chilling in the bucket.

- [Sean] That was so amazing.

- [Emily] I know.

- [Sean] Oh my goodness.

- And that's it for Sci NC for this week.

If you want more Sci NC, be sure to check us out online.

I'm Frank Graff, thanks for watching.

[bright upbeat music] ♪ - [Announcer] Funding for Sci NC is provided by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

[bright upbeat music] ♪