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Late in September, as Hurricane Helene struck the Southeast, Wally Smith immediately thought of the salamanders. Of course, he fretted over the safety of his parents, brother, and extended family in the path of the storm in the north Georgia mountains, but he couldn’t help but worry about the amphibians in harm’s way, too. As a conservation biologist and herpetologist at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, salamanders are his life’s work, particularly at-risk species. Most recently, that includes one elusive giant salamander: the Eastern hellbender. The storm threatened to damage the rivers it inhabits. Even if the hellbenders survived, he recalls thinking, was there a place they could go?

Serious floods are nothing new for Appalachia. But more frequent and severe storms, worsened by climate change, have heightened scientists’ concerns about animals like the Eastern hellbender, which already are facing threats from human development and are less able to bounce back after natural disasters. Even before Helene, researchers estimated that hellbenders have disappeared from around 90 percent of their original habitat.

Natural disasters—say, floods in the Northeast, saltwater intrusion in the Mississippi River, or wildfires in Los Angeles—can be catastrophic for a vulnerable species already on the path to obsolescence. And in coming years, scientists warn, the Trump administration’s staff and funding cuts, paired with efforts to undermine environmental protections, will only make matters worse for plants and animals on the brink.

Helene ended up being among the costliest hurricanes in US history, killing more than 200 people and causing an estimated $78.7 billion in damage. The environment took a hit, too. Migratory birds got thrown off course. An estimated 822,000 acres of forest in North Carolina were mangled. Streams, home to freshwater mussels that live nowhere else on Earth, eroded.

And then there’s the hellbenders: flushed from rock cavities, tossed from rivers, squashed by debris. One, officials told me, turned up in a North Carolina man’s flooded basement weeks after the storm—alive, miraculously—wriggling in a layer of mud. From his home in Wise County, Smith watched trees fall in his backyard. What was all the flooding doing to the river where the hellbenders lived? he recalls wondering, thinking with dread about his field sites on the Holston River toward the North Carolina border.

Flood damage wrought by Hurricane Helene is seen along the Swannanoa River in October 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina.Mario Tama/Getty

Although you wouldn’t know it by looking at their sheer bulk—up to about 2 feet in length and weighing in at more than 3 pounds—Eastern hellbenders are sensitive creatures. As the largest amphibian on the continent, they’re endearingly ugly, with slimy brownish-gray skin, wrinkled like lasagna, and wide-set, lidless eyes. Legend has it they slithered here straight from hell and are known among locals across Appalachia as “mud devils,” “snot otters,” or “grampus,” among other less-than-flattering nicknames.

“A lot of other people see them and freak out,” Smith says. “I think they’re really cute, personally.” Plus, they keep crayfish populations in check and serve as food for creatures like snapping turtles and otters. The hellbender species is at least 160 million years old and has evolved to breathe almost exclusively through its skin.

But in the age of humans, that evolutionary asset is now a liability. As skin breathers, hellbenders require excellent water quality to survive. But with many rivers across the United States becoming increasingly polluted or destroyed, Smith says, “hellbenders, unfortunately, see those impacts first.” The species, he adds, is “not doing great.”

In December, that grim observation became official. The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) proposed to list the Eastern hellbender as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act across its range, spanning 15 states from Georgia and Alabama to New York. According to the agency, the species has seen 41 percent of its historic populations (that is, a group of animals living in one place) across the country disappear, down from 626 documented populations to just 371. Of those remaining, more than half are “in decline.” Just 12 percent are “stable,” according to the FWS, with some of the healthiest streams in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee—among the areas worst hit by Helene. Without some kind of intervention, the proposal warns, “the Eastern hellbender is in danger of extinction.”

Hellbenders are known among locals across Appalachia as “mud devils,” “snot otters,” or “grampus.”Gary Peeples/USFWS

At a certain point, it won’t take much to knock out the hellbender. If you were to line up every species on Earth in the order of most to least at risk of extinction, explains John Wiens, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, those in the front likely would be geographically isolated species, the ones with low numbers, or the species that are unable to travel. (This is, in part, why the vast majority of modern extinctions have been species living on islands, he notes.) Things like disease, invasive species, or land development can also make an already endangered species that much more vulnerable to climate events. Across the world, an estimated 41 percent of amphibians—more than any other animal class—are threatened by extinction, in part because of the effects of climate change, scientists believe, along with the deadly parasitic chytrid fungus, Wiens says.

Researchers like Smith are hoping to be a bulwark against this fate. For the past five years, he and his colleagues have monitored changes in hellbender habitat in Virginia and worked with private landowners to restore it by building up eroded riverbanks and adding supplemental boulders—prime nesting spots for the salamanders.

In November, just over six weeks after Helene hit, Smith agreed to show me a field site on the Holston River. In a short stretch of river, no more than an eighth of a mile, Smith noted all sorts of post-hurricane debris—railroad ties, bits of carpet, tires, a door, a diaper, and an entire rusted car. Dozens of trees had been uprooted or pushed over, as Smith put it as he pointed to one, “like a wet toothpick.”

“When I came down here,” Smith said, “I mean, my jaw literally dropped, because I was like, ‘Am I at the same place?’” He didn’t just mean the garbage piling up: The stream’s very identity was different. For years, Smith had mapped out every boulder, riffle, and run in this stretch of stream. Hellbenders typically nest in cavities underneath river boulders. But now, many of those boulders were gone—either launched downstream or buried, the riverbank widened by erosion, like the face of an old friend ravaged by age. For Smith, that was the most surprising part. “You show up and are like, ‘Where are my rocks?’ Some of these boulders are the size of a 6-foot-tall human, hundreds and hundreds of pounds,” he says. “They are nowhere in sight.”

If I wanted to see some hellbender habitat up close, I’d need to get in the river. From the passenger seat of his government-issued gray Ford Focus, I scarfed down a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and mentally prepared to wade through the frigid water. “It’ll be cold, but it’s not that deep,” Smith promised. We parked, and from the trunk of his car, he pulled out what looked like an orange traffic cone with a viewing window on the wide end—this was a bathyscope, to help scan the riverbed for hellbenders.

According to water samples tested for the amphibians’ DNA, the salamanders were somewhere in this river. Or at least they used to be. Before the hurricane, the salamanders at this site were hanging on in relatively low numbers, possibly due to local farming and urban development, which may have polluted the stream. But even in places where hellbenders are faring better, they’re quite rare. In his entire 16-year career, Smith’s spotted a hellbender in the wild on just two occasions, in part because he’s not looking for them. At least not directly.

Smith’s work focuses on understanding and restoring hellbender habitat—that is, clean rivers with boulders—which is crucial to the animals’ survival. That’s what I came to Virginia to see. We left the car parked on the side of the road and descended into a shallow ravine forested with sycamores and beech trees, dormant for the winter.

In a way, Smith is one of the lucky ones. Weeks after Helene, Lori Williams, a wildlife biologist who specializes in amphibian conservation at the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, says the post-Helene damage was so bad in western North Carolina that it wasn’t safe to visit her river sites. Yancey, Avery, and Mitchell counties, once home to some of the “best of the best” hellbender populations, had been “reamed” by Helene, she told me in November. “I’m anxious to get out there and see it. I’m also kind of scared, but it may be a while. The roads just aren’t there.” (When I checked in with Williams again in April, she said she’s been able to get to only a few sites. In the hardest-hit areas, she said she’s seen “catastrophic damage and change.”)

Helene didn’t just make it logistically difficult for researchers to do their jobs. It took an emotional toll, too. “It’s hard to get proper sleep, hard to take care of yourself,” Williams says. Helene nearly took her elderly parents’ home in a landslide and washed out the road to her house in Fletcher, North Carolina, stranding her for about a week. At home, she scrambled to keep the commission’s 18-year-old, 22-inch educational “ambassador” hellbender named Rocky alive in a 125-gallon aquarium in her basement. She’d already stockpiled hundreds of gallons of water, and after her home lost power, she maintained the tank’s filter with an external battery. “He was my No. 1 focus,” she says. “Keep him alive.” (Rocky, I’m pleased to report, survived.)

Adding to the stress and trauma of surviving a storm, many biologists are grappling with the severe ecological damage to plants and animals they’ve devoted their lives to conserving—an experience that Williams calls “eco-grief.” “It’s heartbreaking, really,” Williams says. “It’s hard not to get depressed and just want to give up—but then, Nope, doggone it. This is what we do. We’ll roll up our sleeves and get back out there.”

Morgan Whitmer is doing just that. As Helene neared her home in Asheville, Whitmer, a reptile technician with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, evacuated to the coast. At first, her apartment appeared to have survived the storm. But then, she found dark brown water had seeped into her bathroom and living room—an upstairs neighbor had left the shower on, and when the city got its water back, everything flooded and it ruined “a lot of personal belongings,” she says.

Now, in something of an echo to her own experience, Whitmer and her team at the commission are working to assess the habitat damage to bog turtles, another western North Carolina species. In November, Whitmer and a colleague, bog turtle technician Rosie Ronca, let me tag along on a bog visit. Just last summer, researchers at this location found evidence of bog turtles—the smallest turtle species in the country—for the first time in more than 20 years, revealed by camera traps placed by scientists. (The commission requested that Mother Jones not publish the bog’s exact location, fearing poaching, a major threat to the turtles.)

As we trudged through the bog’s muddy channels, each step punctuated with a sharp squelch, Whitmer and Ronca looked for evidence of flooding, debris, or sediment deposits (picture layers of dirt). Meanwhile, I worried about stepping on the tiny reptiles. As Ronca explained, bog turtles may have burrowed in the mud, among patches of spikerush, in preparation for winter. On top of that, as a threatened species under federal law (meaning they are at risk of becoming endangered), the turtles are exceedingly uncommon. “We could spend potentially more than one day searching this area for bog turtles and never find one,” Whitmer said, dashing my hopes of spotting one of the creatures.

Hurricane Helene damaged the habitat of North Carolina’s bog turtles—the smallest turtle species in the country, already threatened by poaching.Gary Peeples/USFWS

After about an hour, we’d scoured the whole site. Luckily, aside from an overturned tree and some flooding, it appeared to be in good health—the marshy ground remained wet, but the flooding had been minimal and there was little sediment buildup. “I think this bog lucked out,” Whitmer says. Of the 27 bog turtle sites their team has surveyed across the state since Helene, 16 showed some alterations from the storm, like sediment deposits, erosion, and trash, with eight seeing “severe” impact. For researchers in North Carolina, this work can bring up a lot of that “grief,” Whitmer says. “We’re seeing and taking to heart the devastation to the environment, not just the reptiles, but all of the wildlife that was impacted by this.”

“The amount of human loss is just immense, and it’s really hard. You’re kind of processing all these things at once,” Gabrielle Graeter, a conservation biologist also at the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, says, echoing Whitmer. “But as scientists, as an ecologist or biologist going into these places, it’s a double whammy…It’s been people’s entire careers working on some of these riverine systems.”

Not everyone in the state has the same compassion for critters like hellbenders or bog turtles. “You talk to people who were directly hit by the storm, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, I really don’t care about how the hellbenders are doing,’” Whitmer says. And that’s a hard thing to hear, she adds, “because we care from all sides of it.”

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. (In science speak, they are what’s known as an “indicator species.”) As the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity noted in a 2024 report in support of an endangered listing for the Eastern hellbender, 40 percent of US ecosystems are at risk of collapse. With limited resources to fight this crisis, “the Service should prioritize protecting species that serve as representatives for their entire communities,” the group wrote. “Like the monarch butterfly for pollinators, there is no better sentinel for protecting waterways in the eastern United States than the hellbender.” Later that year, the FWS listened, proposing that the salamander be protected under the Endangered Species Act.

This was before President Donald Trump took office for a second term. Back in 2019, the first Trump administration denied listing the Eastern hellbender under the act, opting to list only one population segment in Missouri, in part because of the “wide distribution of populations” in places like North Carolina, which “guard against catastrophic losses range wide.” At the time, Elise Bennett, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, decried the decision, saying in a press release that it “flagrantly ignores the reality of the hellbender’s dire situation” and “gives these imperiled animals a big shove toward extinction.”

Now, under Trump 2.0., the unofficial Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, has fired thousands of federal employees at scientific agencies like the FWS, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, National Park Service, and National Science Foundation—each with a role in supporting or conducting research on our most at-risk species. This, former officials warn, could mean a higher risk of extinction. “Without my position filled, these species will be neglected for years to come,” Nick Gladstone, a former FWS recovery biologist who had focused on endangered invertebrates (like cave spiders) in Texas, told the Guardian after DOGE terminated his position in March.

Similarly, Smith says he’s collecting data for another species that is currently under review for a federal endangered listing, the yellow-spotted woodland salamander, a terrestrial salamander that lives only in Appalachia. But the Endangered Species Act has been a target for conservatives for decades and was repeatedly undermined by the first Trump administration. “This sounds like a hyperbolic thing to say,” Smith told me in November, with a nervous laugh, “but I’m wondering if we’re going to have an Endangered Species Act in four years.”

More recently, Smith notes, the Trump administration cut or paused EPA funding for stormwater projects in southwest Virginia, including to develop flood plans and add green spaces—efforts intended to help alleviate flooding. “If we’re removing funding awards that are working to make the habitats the hellbender lives in more resilient, that, long term, is potentially going to have ripple effects—pun intended—on the organisms that live in those streams,” he says.

Smith also worries about the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multi-state climate program that’s helped fund flood prevention tactics in Virgina, like the conservation of floodplain land in Fairfax County or updating stormwater models in Charlottesville. In mid-April, Trump signed an executive order seeking to punish state and local governments for any effort to address “climate change,” support “environmental justice,” or reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions. While it didn’t specifically name the initiative and it’s unclear whether the president has such authority, Smith says, the program seems to “fall under that umbrella” of targeted climate laws.

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.

Later, when Smith crunched the numbers, he found that the number of hellbender-suited rocks in this stretch of river had, to his surprise, increased after Helene, from 38 up to 44—good news. But the big unknown is whether a healthy population of hellbenders to occupy those boulders still exists—a question that will probably take years to ascertain. “What keeps me up at night is, we didn’t have a lot that we could lose,” he tells me. (Nearby, another group of Virginia researchers told the Washington Post they suspect many of the 60 hellbender nests they’d been keeping an eye on had been wiped out, although it’s unclear how many animals perished.)

Building back—for the hellbenders, for everyone—will take time. Smith, for his part, anticipates finishing his project on the Holston River this summer and turning to a study on wetland amphibians experiencing the ups and downs of longer droughts and more intense flooding in Virginia’s national forest lands. “Helene was kind of a wake-up call to start looking more directly at what climate extremes specifically mean for local wildlife,” he says.

Williams anticipates her job will look a little different after Helene, too. “It’s changed the rest of our career—all of us, really, who are working in this area.” Before Helene, Williams had spent close to 25 years as a biologist in Virginia and North Carolina and was just starting to think about retirement. Now, she’s not so sure. “Heck, I may go another 20 years,” she says, “because there’s a lot of work to be done.”

Toward the end of my trip, I couldn’t shake the feeling of how completely Helene reshaped, well, everything in North Carolina and Virginia. It wasn’t just the tragedy of lost lives or generational homes gone forever. It wasn’t only the uprooted trees or reshaped streams or all the animals hunkered within them. It was the smallest of things, too: as one survivor put it, like the loss of a favorite restaurant, a shift in the day-to-day work of a biologist, or, for a hellbender, perhaps the loss of a familiar river boulder.

As Smith sees it, hellbenders and humans are different chapters of the same story. Climate change, after all, doesn’t discriminate between species—it’s coming for all of us. “There’s a parallel between humans and wildlife,” he says. “We’re all grappling with those same challenges right now.” As Appalachia recovers, he says, restoring hellbender habitat is, by extension, also restoring our own. The same thing holds when you start taking away flood preparedness funding for communities, he tells me over the phone in April. “You’re hurting the communities, but you’re also hurting the organisms that live in the rivers that those communities depend upon. It really is all connected in the grand scheme of things.”

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