"Snot Otter" Sperm to Save Giant Salamander?

[Frog News]

National Geographic News (Washington DC, USA) August 20th, 2010 03:41 PM: "Snot Otter" Sperm to Save Giant Salamander?

Cryopreservation may be the last chance for the hellbender, aka the snot otter.

It may be a shot in the dark, but freezing sperm is one of the last chances to save the hellbender, North America's biggest salamander, conservationists say.

Hellbenders—also known as snot otters and devil dogs—have dwindled throughout their range, which once encompassed streams from northeastern Arkansas to New York.

The 2.5-foot-long (0.7-meter-long) amphibians have declined by 80 to 90 percent in most of their traditional watersheds in recent decades, and now haunt only isolated pockets of southern Appalachia (see map), said Dale McGinnity, curator of reptiles at Nashville Zoo.

All of the states in the hellbender's range have listed the animal as a "species of special concern," and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is currently reviewing whether to add the hellbender to the federal endangered species list, McGinnity said.

The reasons for their decline is unknown, but it's likely environmental contaminants such as pesticides are harming the creatures via their highly permeable skin, he said.

To make matters worse, hellbenders don't seem to be breeding at all in the wild, he said, possibly because human-made pollutants containing synthetic hormones are damaging the amphibians' reproductive systems.

As a result, there are apparently no young wild hellbenders in existence, only aged individuals—the amphibians likely live between 30 and 80 years, McGinnity said.

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