[Applause]
[Music]
so I’d like to walk you through a guided
imagery exercise so what I like free to
do is set back in your seats relax and
picture in your mind a place that you
really like to visit a special place for
you that I’d like for you to close your
eyes and go there while you’re at your
special place I’d like for you to figure
out what you smell what do you hear walk
around in your special place what is it
that you see how do those attributes
make you feel and lastly I’d like for
you to take a mental picture of that
special place now open your eyes how
many of you in this room had a water
feature in your special place please
raise your hand look around the room the
majority of folks in here had a water
feature as part of their special place
and what that should tell you is water
quality is important to all of us but
the question is how do we monitor and
measure water quality well it turns out
humans have used animals to measure
environmental health for hundreds of
years perhaps you’ve heard the old
phrase the canary in the coal mine this
phrase was coined in 1890 by a Scottish
physiologist named John Scott Haldane
whose research was on the effects of
toxic gases on humans and he knew long
ago that animals were far more sensitive
to environmental change than people and
he termed those animals Sentinel species
and he worked a lot with coal miners and
in coal mines and how those the effects
of carbon monoxide affected people so
the miners would then take a canary this
very small bird down in the coal mines
with them as a bird Canaries have very
high metabolisms and require a lot of
oxygen so they could they could detect
as those carbon monoxide levels began to
to rise alert that to the miners and
they could evacuate the mines and thus
save thousands and thousands of human
lives
so the canary absolutely is a sentinel
for environmental air quality but do we
have an analogue
the aquatic world and it turns out that
we do it’s not a canary in the coalmine
it’s a salamander in the stream and the
species I’d like to introduce you to
today is the eastern hellbender the
eastern hellbender is North America’s
largest salamander it can reach lengths
of up to 24 inches so two feet long for
single salamanders it is indeed called a
giant salamander now I give hellbender
talks all over the country and every
time I give that statistics people
really just don’t appreciate how
impressive this species is so as a
special treat for this audience today I
brought one for you and I’d like to show
it to you so give me just a second to
grab ahold of him and here he is now
obviously this is not a real Eastern
hellbender I had to bring a plaster
replica but I did want to show this to
you to show you just how impressive this
particular species is I like to direct
your attention to the geographic
distribution map on the right of the
screen and you can see in blue is where
the eastern hellbender
is located throughout the eastern United
States especially along the Appalachian
Mountain region but pay particular
Clinch attention to Indiana in
south-central Indiana you might see a
little blue sliver of blue on the
south-central portion of the state that
is the only place hellbenders occur in
Indiana and in fact hellbenders are an
endangered species in Indiana and the
only River they occur in is called the
Blue River so what’s going on with
hellbenders well they rely on very fast
flowing clear waters and there are two
reasons why we think help owners are
climbing not only in Indiana but across
the entire geographic distribution and
one of those would be the influx of
nutrients into the aquatic system and
the second factor is an increase in
sedimentation in the rivers and streams
where these hellbenders live so what is
it about the natural history of the
biology of Eastern hellbenders that make
them an important Sentinel species for
environmental water quality well first
like all in phibian x’ hellbenders have
permeable skin which means they readily
absorb things in their environment good
things like oxygen so they absorb oxygen
through their skin which allows them to
breathe underwater but it also allows
them to absorb
harmful things like pollutants or
harmful chemicals that are in the
environment the second factor that makes
a hellbender a really great Sentinel
species for water quality is their
lifecycle they’re fully aquatic and I’ll
direct your attention to the top of the
slide the small little yellow marble
sized structures those are hellbender
eggs so females will lay about 300 eggs
without every year and males will guard
those for about sixty days those after
those eggs hatch they’re about an inch
an inch and a half long that’s how they
this large giant salamander starts life
out about an inch and a half long with
little plume like external gills from
which it absorbs oxygen and they rely on
these these fast flowing clear streams
because they like to hide in the
interstitial spaces of gravel along the
stream bed and that’s how they elude
predators so if we have high sediment
loads that fills up those interstitial
spaces hellbenders have no place to hide
when they’re really little and
susceptible to predation after two years
they will readily absorb those external
gills and a partial transformation and
becomes juveniles and they’ll stay
juveniles for an additional five years
so it takes seven years for hellbenders
to reach sexual maturity but once they
reach that point they can reproduce for
an additional twenty five years so that
third feature that makes them a great
indicator of environmental water quality
is the fact that they’re long-lived
these salamanders can live 30 years in
the wild which is an incredibly long
time for an amphibian to live so if you
have a long-lived species that is
declining throughout a large portion of
its range that’s usually an indicator
that there’s something going on with our
water quality and certainly cause for
concern now oftentimes when I give
hellbender talks I get asked the same
one or two questions and their very
first question I’m oftentimes ask is rod
have you always been interested in
hellbenders well if you remember in
Indiana we have one river called the
Blue River and my story began in back
when I was 16 years old I took my very
first canoe trip in the Blue River I
canoed over some of the best hellbender
habitats in the state over some of the
best hellburner populations in the state
but I had no idea at that time because
my 16 year old girlfriend was also in
the canoe and I was distracted
and my 16 year old girlfriend
unfortunately was a terrible canoer and
we spent more time out of the canoe
because she kept capsizing it than we
did in the canoe
now despite her lack of canoeing skills
I actually went on to marry that 16 year
old girl she’s in the fourth row right
now and we celebrate our 21st wedding
anniversary this June thank you so
clearly that experience had a profound
effect on my life and so when my son
turned 16 last year I took him to the
Blue River and week I act on the exact
same stretch of river that I kept on
back in 1990 because I wanted him to
experience those deeply waters I wanted
him to experience those rocky outcrops
and the the borders of the river laden
with beautiful trees and that really
brings me to the second reason a second
question that I’m often times ask is
what can I do as a person to ensure that
the water quality remains high for the
next generation and what can we do to
improve water quality for aquatic
species like the eastern hellbender
well there’s only three things I’m going
to talk to you about today and they’re
quite simple and the first really
revolves around water quality our water
water conservation so in the United
States we use an estimated nine point
three trillion gallons of water annually
nine billions of gallons of water on a
daily basis largely for landscape
irrigation which includes things like
watering our lawn watering our garden
and watering our flowers and so that’s a
lot of water that we’re pulling from the
tap and so there are some simple
practices that we can adopt to minimize
our water usage from the tap and one of
those is simply purchasing a rain barrel
and you can get those mere Soil and
Water Conservation District you go to
your County Extension Office oftentimes
purchase those many times at a reduced
rate and it’s very simple you take that
rain barrel and you install it
underneath of your downspout on your
house so during rainfall events your
roof collects the water it runs down
your downspout and right into the rain
barrel you can attach a water hose at
the very bottom in the rain barrel and
you have 55 gallons of free water to use
for your lawn your garden and your
flowers so a great way to MIT to
minimize the water that we’re using out
of our tap now
many of us probably also have lawns that
we like to maintain or perhaps you know
someone that has a lawn that they like
to maintain and we as a culture like to
have very well manicured lawns and
that’s okay but there’s two problems are
sometimes associated with maintaining
along one is sometimes folks will over
fertilize their lawn over apply the
fertilizer that’s necessary and two they
use fertilizer with high levels of
phosphorous again it’s getting back to
those nutrients that get into the stream
so what happens when you over fertilize
and use fertilizers with phosphorous is
during rainfall events those excess
nutrients will will run out of your lawn
down the sidewalk into the storm drain
and are directly diverted into the
rivers and streams once they’re in the
rivers and streams they cause vegetation
to grow at unprecedented rates when that
vegetation dies the decomposition
changes the chemistry of the water the
chemistry of the water with things like
oxygen when remember hellbenders need
oxygen in the water to breathe so we can
have a direct effect on the aquatic life
living there so I’ll just charge you to
think about the application of
fertilizer this spring and try to use
phosphate free fertilizer as the spring
is approaching and you guys start
thinking about manage maintaining your
launch this spring the last practice I’m
going to talk about really revolves
around agriculture now I suspect many of
the folks in here are not farmers but
you can’t think about farming in Indiana
without talking about it because it has
such a huge footprint across the
landscape of the state of Indiana and
one of the one of the practice that I’m
really excited about farmers adopting
our cover crops many of you have
probably driven around the Midwest in
the fall and seen farmers either
harvesting corn or soybeans and then
they immediately go back into the fields
and they’ll plant another crop in the
sort of offseason and those cover crops
serve two really valuable purposes the
first is when those crops begin to grow
and those roots go down in the ground
they’re readily absorbing nutrients
those same nutrients that the farmers
apply those fertilizers on those crops
in the spring and summer are now being
absorbed by those plants and not seeping
down through the groundwater and again
going directly into the rivers and
streams or aquatic salamanders live so
they’re being held by the plants the
second important feature is those plants
themselves are helping to stabilize the
soil and it’s really important that the
soil stays where
belongs in the field and not in the
rivers and streams because remember that
having said it the soil erosion caused
all those soil particles to goes into
the rivers and streams fills in those
interstitial spaces where juvenile
hellbenders live and where the aquatic
prey things like macro invertebrates or
crayfish live where the hellbenders need
to eat so it really doesn’t matter
whether or not you live in a subdivision
or a 2,000 acre family farm there’s a
really simple things that we can do and
if we do so collectively can have a
profound impact on the on the water
quality at a large scale now when I
started the presentation I asked you
guys to share with with the group your
special place and whether or not your
place had a water feature so I thought I
would share my special place with you
and I suspect it is not a surprise that
at the centerpiece of my landscape is a
water feature and this is actually a
picture of a stream behind my house and
this is a place that I go to quite
frequently when life gets a little
hectic when I need to recharge my
batteries or perhaps just reflect a
little bit I go down to the edge of the
creek lean my back up against a tree
listen to the riffles the water run over
the rocks and the riffles and sort of
wash my stress right downstream into the
neighbor’s yard but one of things I want
to challenge everybody to do today is
think about what it is that you can do
so that when you look at landscapes like
this the landscapes in reality can be
just as pristine as those that you have
in your mind if we do those things we
can certainly help the hellbender
and forever ensure that they remain the
salamanders in the stream thank
[Applause] you