JENNIE GARLINGTON: On this episode of Ecosense... TAINA McCLEOD: Once they find a boulder and settle into it, that's their boulder.

They don't want a roommate.

MISSY PETTY: I think having something that is unique and is nowhere else in the world, is something to treasure.

JARED DUBIN: Restoring this area is going to be a collaboration between us and the ecosystem itself as it heals itself.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: One of the most bizarre-looking creatures you'll ever find in our cleanest rivers and creeks is the hellbender salamander.

Their strange appearance, and reaction to danger, have inspired some pretty colorful nicknames.

♪ ♪ BRIAN FLOCK: The Snot Otter is the main one.

Devil Dogs is another one.

BILL SUTTON: You've got lasagna sides, that's a good one there.

DALE McGINNITY: Allegheny Alligator.

Grumpus is an unusual one.

PIA SANDONATO: I thought they were really weird creatures, but the more you find out about them, the more you realize how important they are.

♪ ♪ DALE: We're in the Aquatic Conservation Center, here at the zoo.

Today we're releasing some hellbenders that we collected as eggs, and have been raising for eight years.

TAINA: Each animal has the transmitter inside of them with a specific frequency associated to it.

I'm just double-checking.

Typed in the frequency, it's beeping.

BILL: 1F90 good to go.

Well we use the telemetry, we use that to find the animal first and then the pit tag reader to actually read the location of the animal and get the exact cover object location.

6725.

Good to go there also.

DALE: Hellbenders here in the conservation facility have had it pretty easy.

They've been cuddled and coddled and given everything they want to eat.

This is a beautiful individual, lots of orange, and these are all from the same clutch, but there's a lot of variation in color and also how fast they grow.

And we're just getting ready to bag 'em up to head out to the release site.

♪ ♪ MICHELLE PRESTON: I grew up loving salamanders and turning over rocks in eastern Kentucky and identifying them.

Dale called me and said, "We are breeding hellbenders at the Nashville Zoo, and your property has been identified as a good breeding ground for hellbenders, and you have some native ones there.

Could we release some?"

And yes, the answer was a very excited, "Yes!"

DALE: The perfect release site is one where there's just a few resident animals, which is basically anywhere in Middle Tennessee that still has hellbenders, a clean stream, and has lots and lots of rocks, just like what we have here.

TAINA: I chose to study the hellbenders mostly because of the conservation implication that's behind it.

Because they're salamanders, they breathe through their skin.

So, the health of the watershed is so essential to their well-being.

Even though I'm focusing on hellbenders, it's true if we help the hellbender, it helps the mussels, the fish, and then people use the fresh water too so, it's like human health is an implication and it's just so multifaceted.

It just so happens, it is with North America's largest salamander, which is super cool.

So that's a bonus!

BRIAN FLOCK: The Duck River is one of the most ecological diverse watersheds in Tennessee as well as in the nation.

It's also been nicknamed the Amazon of North America because there's over 150 species of fish.

There's over 50 species of freshwater mussels as well as 40 species of aquatic snails.

DALE: In the Duck River watershed, we're only finding older and older animals, and that means the health of the population structure is off.

So, we think we're losing larva because they have a different lifestyle.

They live in the interstitial spaces of the gravel as tiny little larvae, and that's getting filled in with silt.

The silt may have chemicals bound to it.

We just can't find younger animals.

So, we're pretty sure that that's the life cycle where they're not surviving.

And that means they're going to go away if we don't start putting younger animals in.

♪ ♪ Typically, we just look for a rock that's got a cavity about this big underneath it that we can release the hellbenders into.

♪ ♪ BILL: Who's doing the release?

TAINA: James.

BILL: Do you want me to hold you down, James?

JAMES: Yeah, would you mind?

♪ ♪ TAINA: Leave it there.

JAMES: Actually, his tail is still -- TAINA: Give him a little tickle.

DALE: During the breeding season, it takes the perfect rock to be a nest rock, it's got to have an entrance hole that's just about the size of a hellbender's head so he can really guard it.

Females line up and come into their rock to lay eggs, and other less buff males, also sneak in and try to get their genes to fertilize the eggs too, because they're externally fertilizing salamanders.

So, they go into that den site, a female lays the eggs, and the males just cover 'em with sperm.

TAINA: Previously we had released I think about nine animals here.

So, they're pretty settled and now we're going to search for them to make sure we're not putting a new animal under that same rock because these animals can be very territorial.

So, once they find a boulder and settle into it, that's their boulder.

They don't want a roommate.

After we make sure we know where our previously released ones are, we're going to go in to make sure there's no resident hellbenders, and the residents are the fully wild, never spent a day in the zoo.

So, they're definitely territorial and we super don't want to put a zoo animal under there.

♪ ♪ - The hellbender?

TAINA: Yeah.

- That big.

- Sweet.

TAINA: Bill just found a resident under a really good rock that he thinks we can lift, so I'm going to go get the log pv, and work up stuff, so we're going to try to catch it, bring it out, mark it, and it'll be exciting because the residents are huge, typically.

- Oh, I'll tell you to go slow.

- He's underneath that rock.

- Make sure there's not a hole at the bottom.

- Only just start lifting but lift really slow, okay?

♪ ♪ - That's a beast.

Nice.

- It's a big boy.

- Yeah.

- We ought to pit tag this guy again.

TAINA: That one was active... - Yeah.

TAINA: ...swam out.

So, this is the resident that we just caught under a large boulder.

Now that we have it here, we're going to work 'em up, which entails getting a couple swabs.

One swab will be for disease, one swab will be to assess the skin microbiome, then we'll get the length and mass.

We'll get a tissue sample and that'll be to determine the sex of the animal and then finally we'll put a pit tag in him.

So, from then on he'll have a unique ID, and he will become part of the study.

This is really a treat.

We don't get our hands on resident hellbenders that often, especially because they're in such severe decline in this area.

BILL: Sorry.

Little splash.

And this is what hellbenders do when they get a little bit defensive.

They'll snot up their skin like this and it's a defensive mechanism and it's an anti-predator type of response to avoid being eaten.

So, they will secrete this kind of foamy substance.

PIA: The fact that they're still alive right now is pretty impressive given the whole, how the world is changing and the climate change in general.

♪ ♪ DALE: You know, between Tennessee and North Carolina it's the highest biodiversity hotspot in the world for salamanders.

♪ ♪ PIA: We want to do our best to try to keep the populations going until we find self-sustainable populations in the wild that actually breed by themselves and they don't need our help anymore.

♪ ♪ JENNIE: What if I told you that mountain streams are home to fish as bright and colorful as the ones on coral reefs?

Thanks to Conservation Fisheries, they're making a comeback.

ANDREW ZIMMERMAN: When I first saw them underwater, I popped my head out of the water and I said, "That's not real!"

There's no way that fish is real.

I thought it was a fisherman's bait that was stuck underwater.

The colors were so vibrant.

BO BAXTER: They're beautiful fish.

They've got these bluish green and red stripes down the side.

I kind of think they look like a pack of candy.

Just gorgeous little fish.

CRYSTAL RUBLE: These guys are just phenomenal.

If everyone would just get their face in the water and figure out what is under the surface, they would want to protect it too.

♪ ♪ MISSY PETTY: The number of species that we have in the southeastern United States rivals what you may see in the Amazon or in our ocean reefs.

I think Tennessee has probably over 350 species.

Probably 25% if not more, are very, very rare and imperiled.

BO: "We save fish," is what we like to say.

So, Conservation Fisheries is a nonprofit that raises rare, threatened and endangered fish for reintroduction efforts all across the Southeastern U.S.

CRYSTAL: I typically like to take on new species that are coming into Conservation Fisheries to make sure that the protocol that we are implementing works for every species because they all have different life histories.

In the hatchery we try to provide temperatures and photo period like they are in the wild.

MISSY: We were the first to successfully produce the number of young candy darters that we produced.

We were thinking, you know, if we get a couple of hundred, that is a huge success.

Right?

Well, we ended up seeing over 1,000 young, and then we had a 91% survival rate out of those young to be returned to the wild.

BO: We've been partners with Virginia for decades restoring their fish.

We've been doing this for 40 years and we've gotten really good at it.

♪ ♪ ANDREW: Candy darters are only found in West Virginia and Virginia, really restricted to higher elevation streams.

They've had a lot of impacts from mining, habitat destruction, and they need excellent water quality, they need great habitat as well.

♪ ♪ ANDREW: We've made it up to our release location where we're going to augment a population of candy darters and we're starting to acclimate them to the water temperature and the water chemistry that's in the stream compared to the water quality and temperature at our hatchery.

We have a total of 471 fish that we'll be releasing into the site.

CRYSTAL: They need to be a good two to three times bigger than they are now.

So, next year, just being able to see them out here while seining or snorkeling is going to be great because we know that they overwintered.

And the best success is going to be two years out if we see babies.

ANDREW: They're insectivores, so they eat insects.

So they'll go around in the swift sections of streams called riffles where they've adapted to live.

They have these big pectoral fins and pelvic fins and dorsal fins, coddle fin.

They all use almost like the wings on an airplane or sails on a sailboat, but directing themselves in the current to dart around in between all the gravel and cobble and boulders and eat the little aquatic insects that live on them.

♪ ♪ CRYSTAL: Oh, I was teary-eyed.

[Laughter] It felt really good.

We've had to do early releases this year because we were so above and beyond our expectations of successful.

Having almost a thousand fish that we are releasing this year is something else.

We do our best to minimize any stress these fish could experience but it's always a risk.

MIKE PINDER: They have several threats.

The overall threat, historically is just habitat degradation, just impacts the water quality and excessive sediment in the water, either through, like, parking lots, agricultural fields, anywhere where there's exposed soil that gets washed into the stream.

It fills up those little spaces between the rocks, and that's where the fish like to lay their eggs.

A second source is impoundments.

So when you take a stream that's moving, it's a dynamic system, and you put an impoundment on it, a dam, that's going to back the water up, it's going to change the ecology of that body of water.

Now, one of the bigger impacts is hybridization, where we have a species called the variegate darter that has come into the habitat of the candy darter in the West Virginia portion of the range.

BO: Hybridization is a really weird thing.

The definition of a species is an animal that can't breed with another species.

Fish don't obey that rule, so they're actually able to cross breed with a closely-related fish called the variegate darter.

When that happens, it changes the genetic makeup of the fish and when another species comes in and starts to swamp out those unique genes, it's usually not a good thing.

MIKE: Climate change does play a part because this is a cool water species.

And so, as the water warms, these animals are going to be pushed to more restricted habitats where they can find that kind of Goldilocks zone where it's not too cold, it's not too warm, and that's going to restrict more and more.

And the climate change is going to affect the vegetation you find along the banks, it's going to allow more sunlight to hit the river.

BO: As those streams warm it affects reproduction, it affects the life cycle of the fish.

We depend on clean water as humans, so restoring these fish is a sign that the streams are in good shape.

So, these are the canaries in the coal mine.

They're the most sensitive fish in the community.

So, when they disappear, that means there's a bigger problem with our waterways.

So, we work with state and federal partners to first fix the water quality problems, clean up the habitats.

We're kind of the last step putting these sensitive fish back into the stream.

MIKE: It's a unique species.

It's found nowhere else in the world.

The species can be rarer than tigers or pandas.

And every continent to me has their own unique animal, but this is one of our unique animals, and I think every country has a responsibility to protect their rare resources, and I want to make sure there are things that are native, beautiful, and future generations can appreciate the work we're doing right now.

MISSY: I think having something that is unique and is nowhere else in the world is something to treasure.

I like to think of how can I have awe in my life and be like, "Look at this wonder," right?

Sometimes that's just getting outside and listening to birds or looking at the sky.

But I also think it's important that water and the life that water sustains, I think it's important that we recognize that.

♪ ♪ CRYSTAL: We are also living in such a special area of the country that has the highest diversity of aquatic species, of even, you know, amphibians, plants, it's a temperate rainforest and we need to protect all aspects of that.

And you never know what taking one little thing away does to the whole picture.

Today, is candy darter graduation day.

[Laughter] ♪ ♪ JENNIE: When hurricane Helene battered Western North Carolina, it was a shock to the system in every way.

The people of Yancey County are still learning lessons about the power of their rivers and their community.

TAL DALTON: We call this the flood tree.

Twenty-six feet above the bottom of the river.

So typically, the river flows at about a foot in height.

Right now, it might be closer to two feet.

These are somewhere in the sort of 10, 11, 12 feet in height.

Then we get up to 14, 15, 17, and then 26 feet for Helene.

♪ ♪ JESS SCHANER: I'll never forget that night and that day of coming down and seeing the food co-op where I live washing away.

Even last night we had a storm with strong winds, and I was up all night last night.

I still am just pretty triggered by the winds.

♪ ♪ JARED DUBIN: Hurricane Helene hit Yancey County very hard.

Yeah.

Nobody's ever seen a storm like that.

JESS: Yancey County had the highest rainfall and the highest wind speeds recorded in the storm.

It recorded up on Mount Mitchell, I think it was 110 miles per hour, 115 miles per hour and we had like 31 inches of rain.

JARED: It was the waterways that got hit the hardest.

If you lived along a river like this, then you are basically 50/50 chance of losing your home, either having it washed away altogether or being flooded so much that it needs to be torn down.

JESS: Right after the flood, once everyone was like, "Okay, we're all safe."

It was, "Okay, there's barrels of hydraulic fluid leaking into the river," and there was no one organizing these river cleanups.

And so, I was like, "All right, Sunday.

Every Sunday we're going to get out there.

We're just going to do what we can."

JARED: Thanks everyone for coming.

Today we're going to be cleaning, and we're going to be planting.

One group's going to be focused on planting river cane.

So, for the past month we've been harvesting river cane rhizomes from all around the county.

You just cut them up, put them in some soil, and eventually they send up a shoot.

TAL: We started this "cane train" project, trying to replant it after the hurricane because all of a sudden, you know, there's a real need for creating these riparian habitats and finding plants that'll really anchor the soil.

I like to call it the "mangrove of the mountains."

A lot of people are familiar with mangroves down in Florida or places where there's issues with sea level rise and hurricanes that are impacting the coastline.

And the mangroves really help hold the soil.

And same goes for the river cane.

ADAM GRIFFITH: This is a section of river cane rhizome.

The rhizome is actually an underground stem.

About one third of the entire plant system is in the rhizomes and roots, and two thirds is in the above ground stems.

The above ground stems did a great job reducing the water velocity during the flood, but the rhizomes kept these mats of river cane glued to the surface of the earth during this historic flooding.

There are numerous examples all over Western North Carolina where the erosion was significantly reduced because of river cane on the landscape.

JARED: The river cane is a great habitat for birds and bugs and all kinds of critters, so we're excited to use the storm as an opportunity to get it back into the wilds.

JESS: River cane is one of the most endangered ecosystems in the Southeast.

So apparently less than 2% of its native range is left.

JARED: And then the other group is going to go all the way down the river, around the corner past the campground and there's a huge mess there.

JESS: Honestly, the trash cleanups on the river are a lot of fun for people because it is crazy what is just out there.

My partner one day found a Ken-Barbie and then a couple hours later, he found the Barbie and reunited them and it was just the cutest thing.

He, like, put them in the trash aisle together so they were together at last.

There's all sorts of stuff out there.

Soaked packs of adult diapers that weighed like 20 pounds.

Chemical jugs and oil, blue Styrofoam insulation board is just everywhere, crumbling.

So yeah, we are committed to getting it out of there.

TAL: Some of the difficulties have come in play when they've been doing the woody debris cleanup, which most of us who have a more ecological worldview of how the river functions feel like most of that really should be left.

JESSICA RUEGG: When I started hearing how in other counties and even other parts of this county, they're driving equipment through the riverbed, I was extremely alarmed because just the weight of the equipment is pushing down all the rocks into the substrate, into the sediment beneath it.

And those little fish and the salamanders need the space between rocks to breed and to hide, that's their habitat.

And so, you know, not only are individual animals going to be crushed but also that habitat they need is altered for years.

Unfortunately, one crew came to this area.

There were a lot of downed trees, but it was also full of rhododendrons and other riparian shrubbery that holds the soil in place.

They were hoping to get to a very large debris pile just downstream.

Fortunately, I was able to just say, you know, "As a landowner, I would like you to leave."

And so, they left, which was a huge relief.

But as you can see, they did a lot of damage here.

If this had been like this during Helene, all of this soil would be in Tennessee.

But because of the shrubs that were here before, this soil was able to stay.

They were not bad people, they're great people, they weren't informed about what the river needs to stay healthy.

JESS: A lot of us look at a river and want it to look clean and tidy when really the state of a river is messy.

So, all those log jumbles in there, all that chaos, they're what make the habitat and the food for a lot of aquatic species.

And the wood also really helps to slow the water down and help let it get into the floodplain.

This idea about just wholesale woody debris removal is kind of an outdated concept and most of the current research is advising that to do this really strategic targeted removal, focusing on large woody debris piles around bridges and other infrastructure that are going to be impacted, but not picking a river clean.

TAL: It's a huge industry here, trout fishing and some bass fishing.

It's incredibly important to have that structure of woody stuff in the river to create that habitat both for the fish themselves and also for the food chain.

We lost a lot of riparian trees that were shading the creeks, the tributaries, and the river itself.

And so we're afraid that the water temperature is going to be a lot warmer than it has been in the past.

So, the wood that is there is really helping shade the water and keep it cool.

JESS: A lot of people love the South Toe, but I feel like I just come from it from this other deeper appreciation of just knowing how special it is with all the rare plants and animals and just, like, yeah, really lucky to have so much.

♪ ♪ I find that just picking one place that you love to protect really gives me something to focus on and keep moving forward and not trying to get overwhelmed with just, all of the scope of the destruction of the world.

♪ ♪ JARED: Everyone gather around.

Restoring this area is going to be a collaboration between us and the ecosystem itself as it heals itself.

I've really felt like we've been living through crisis for many years now, as far as the climate changing and the political situation.

It's an ongoing state of emergency.

And we came through the storm, we took care of each other.

We saw the value of community and our own power and what we can do for ourselves and what we can endure.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪