Anatomy of an Extinction
April 23, 2025 at 04:30PMFor Mother Jones, Jackie Flynn Mogensen reports on the threats facing North America’s largest amphibian—a giant aquatic salamander called the Eastern hellbender—and how climate disasters, like Hurricane Helene, and the Trump Administration’s environmental policies are both accelerating the species’ potential extinction. Mogensen’s reporting provides a wide view of how extinctions happen, while her interactions with conservation biologists and wildlife specialists offer a narrative layer that make us root for the hellbender—and other endangered creatures that are just trying, like us, to survive catastrophic events.
The unfortunate reality is that if hellbenders go extinct, that’s not just bad for them; it’s bad for us, too. Because of their sensitive skin, hellbenders are something of “a canary in the coal mine” for the health of streams, Smith says, and can serve as early detection systems for polluted waters, not to mention the health of the wider ecosystem.
“Like the monarch butterfly for pollinators, there is no better sentinel for protecting waterways in the eastern United States than the hellbender.”
In Virginia, on the bank of the Holston, Smith pointed to a boulder halfway submerged in the river. While many of the rocks he’d known had been displaced, this one was new. Its presence, it would turn out, was something of a “silver lining” for the hellbender, at least at this location. The boulder had formed a new cavity that theoretically could be great home for them, he said. We each took a turn looking through the bathyscope for a sign of slimy, wrinkled life—but no dice. This rock, as far as we could tell, sheltered no hellbender.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/23/anatomy-of-an-extinction/
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