As the mist rises over the river, researcher Bill Hopkins goes in search of a giant salamander called a hellbender that makes the river its home.
“I’m gonna noodle around, reach up under some rocks here, and see what we can find, but this looks pretty good right here‚" Hopkins said, as he stood in the middle of the stream with a diver’s mask and snorkel on his head.
He’s been studying the creatures for at least two decades.
Hellbenders live under rocks, hugging the bottom with sticky toes - making them hard to find. Yet after all those years, Hopkins has a pretty good idea where to look.
Though he finds one rather quickly, the chances of anyone finding one are declining.
“So hellbenders are in a lot of trouble. We know that they’ve been declining since at least the 1980s, probably longer, and they’ve disappeared from hundreds of streams across their range,” Hopkins said.
Hellbenders breathe through their skin, with unique folds along their body flowing in the current to increase their oxygen intake.
The creatures date back to the dinosaurs, so they’ve survived everything the world has thrown at them.
Hopkins and his team of researchers at Virginia Tech, where he is the Thomas H. Jones Professor of Wildlife Conservation, are trying to figure out why males, which guard their young for eight months, are suddenly abandoning their nests.
“And what we found is that in streams with degraded water quality, the males aren’t doing their job. They’re not taking care of those babies, and then all the babies die,” he explained.
A scan of this hellbender with a special electronic device shows it has a microchip, placed inside the animal in a previous trip to the river - so the team can compare its health to previous examinations. It’s a healthy hellbender. It’s about a foot and a half long, one of many measurements and observations he’ll record this day.
“We always, when we do our health assessment, we always check for open wounds, any sort of distinguishing marks, any sort of missing toes,” he said.
Back at his lab, at Virginia Tech, Hopkins heads a pilot project raising baby hellbenders to release back into the wild.
Fortunately, there is still a solid population of hellbenders in Appalachia where cold, clear rivers meet the animal’s needs. Yet, it’s a bit of a mystery why their numbers are going down.
“They are highly specialized, which, unfortunately, makes them even more vulnerable to changes in the environment. And so they’ve been hanging on for millions of years. But something that we’re doing in the environment now in modern times is affecting them in unprecedented ways,” Hopkins explained.
Hellbenders are not exactly pretty. Yet they are harmless to people. And in a way, valuable as an early indicator of water quality issues, and somehow even more than that.
“You know, I think it’s so cool. This is an animal that is really a symbol of this region. If you think about Appalachia as this place with amazing biodiversity, from salamanders to fish to crayfish to ferns to mushrooms to millipedes, this is an amazing place. And I think... Hellbenders really, they’re sort of like the iconic figure for that biodiversity,” he said.
Though they are not yet listed on the endangered species list, Hopkins believes they will be in the next few years.
Although they are mostly unknown to the population at large, more and more people are learning about the species.
Coming up on June 26, 2026, the Salem RidgeYaks baseball team is hosting Hellbender Night to celebrate the unique wildlife of Southwest Virginia and support conservation efforts for the hellbender.
Hopkins’ research team will be there with information, and a portion of the proceeds from the game will support his research.