It's the picture that has wildlife biologist buzzing.

A rarely seen giant salamander called the eastern hellbender caught on camera at an eastern Kentucky river.

We spoke to a Kentucky Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources biologist who was there for the rare encounter.

He says finding an eastern hellbender tells them a lot about the health of Kentucky's waterways.

This picture was taken out in northeast Kentucky, out in the licking River.

This population that that picture was taken from, we actually have known about this population for quite a long time.

And the hellbender in question we've actually known about for since about 2021, he was tagged by a researcher doing a hellbender project for us at the University of Kentucky.

But he's always under that same rock every year.

He's one of the ones that we found this year.

So, but we brought out our aquatic, one of our mussel biologists with us, and he has this really great little endoscope camera.

And he was able to get in there and get that really great picture of him.

They are the largest salamander in the United States in North America.

And they're the third largest salamander in the world.

Other than the Chinese and the Japanese giant salamanders.

And those guys are bigger than, like two people long.

They're humongous.

Those things are so Hellbenders are giant in their in their world, and they are thought to not have evolved very much, not changed very much since they first started seeing them in the fossil record.

So we like to refer to them as like ancient dragons, like they have been around for a very long time.

Evolutionarily, they're definitely just an Appalachian species.

They're kind of known as a symbol of Appalachia.

Hellbenders range wide, live in the Appalachian Mountains.

Typically live in streams with very good water quality.

It's very cold water, and it'll move pretty quickly because that kind of water holds more oxygen and they breathe completely through their skin.

So they need as much oxygen as possible.

They're called the canary in the coal mine of Appalachian streams or in water quality.

Because they are such an indicator of water quality, they are as big as they are and as tough as they look.

They are very, very sensitive species.

And they get stressed out emotionally and physiologically very easily.

So because they breathe completely through their skin, any pollutant in that stream is coming in through their skin as well.

And so it can impact them.

Any pollutant that's off of their normal amount that they can tolerate.

They will be one of the first things to react in the stream because they're breathing constantly it in all over their bodies.

So that is a really big issue.

Eastern Hellbenders, we think, have declined range wide by at least 80%.

So they are just strikingly declined.

They are much harder to see nowadays.

We are actively asking people to tell us where they are so that we can go out and try to look at the habitat and kind of understand where they're still holding on.

The biggest thing I want to emphasize is that they're really hard to find.

So if you find one, we would really love the help.

They should be able to get there and try to understand them or they're not scary.

They'll leave you alone.

They just want to live under their rock.

Their whole existence is to look like a rock.

Be like a rock.

They don't move much at all, so they're not going to hurt you.

The lesson there is be the rock.

He says the eastern hellbender will be officially listed as an endangered species soon, and there are conservation efforts underway to save them.

Those efforts include rearing them in captivity until they're old enough to survive and breed, and putting artificial nest boxes in rivers for them to use as shelters.