First Zoo-raised Hellbender Successfully Reproducing in the Wild

The Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) announces that a zoo-raised Ozark hellbender has successfully reproduced within the Current River.

“We are very excited to announce this news,” said Missouri State Herpetologist Jeff Briggler. “This is the first documented event of a zoo-raised hellbender fathering a clutch of eggs in the wild.”

Rivers in southern Missouri and adjacent northern Arkansas once supported up to 27,000 Ozark hellbenders. Today, fewer than 1,000 exist in the world – so few that the Ozark hellbender was added to the federal endangered species list in October 2011.

MDC partnered with the Ron and Karen Goellner Center for Hellbender Conservation, a part of the Saint Louis Zoo WildCare Institute, and other agencies in the early 2000s to breed the salamanders in captivity and rear eggs collected from the wild in order to combat drastic population declines. Once the captive-bred larvae reached between 3-8 years old, they were released in their native Ozark aquatic ecosystem. Biologists began releasing a few zoo-raised hellbenders in Missouri in 2008, later increasing the number of released animals to 1,000 or more per year beginning in 2012. Since the conception of the breeding and raising of this animal in captivity, more than 10,000 Ozark and eastern hellbenders raised at the Saint Louis Zoo and MDC hatchery have been released into their native rivers.

Meet the Responsible Herpetoculture Journal #19