Kentucky's First Hellbender Release 

We called them mud puppies.

I was thinking it was a metal band at first.

@@randy4768 Mudpuppies are actually a different species! They can live in similar habitats, but mudpuppies are smaller (and have other distinguishing characteristics)

A name given to them by the ignorant, and superstitious.

@@markkubiak8296 good try at acting like you're intelligent..your claim is totally baseless

I caught one in 81 in Greenup County Ky. The game warden was called and he called it a water dog too.

I had a cool teacher like that in the 8th grade. The old woman changed my whole life.

Oh, you definitely loved her 🤣🤣🤣🤣

Bah hahahaha!!

Hellbender, the sixth element.

I feel your pain

Thin line between love and hell, I mean hate.

Unfortunetly due to unsustainable construction and farming pracitces, our streams are dying. Kids 20 years from now will never know the awesome wildlife and nature we have right now if we dont change our ways.

Wish more people knew that money from fishing and hunting tags goes back to conservation. Something I like to point out to vegans and other uneducated people

Even if you don't hunt or fish, everyone should buy a license to help support conservation!

@@seribas and all the poachers (unless you’re poor as shit in the country and need food, I could really care less if you’re not being needlessly wasteful). One thing I’d like to see is how my state, Iowa, allocates the funds they receive because I know we make a huge amount of money on whitetail tags and associated liscences, yet the species has been extremely overpopulated ever since I can remember, which makes me thinks there’s other incentives due to funding going towards other programs, so they try to rake in as much money as possible without regard to conservation, road safety, etc. Idk, I know my state is bottom of the barrel for conservation, water quality and similar metrics so maybe I shouldn’t be looking to Iowa as an example of how these programs would normally be handled.

Buy guns and ammo, too. The Pittman-Robertson act created an 11% excise tax on them that is earmarked for conservation.

Its always a shame hearing stories of people killing animals because they dont understand them

The Japanese giant salamander can grow to 3 feet long. There's also a much prettier, almost alien looking salamander with a smiling face called an axolotl that is only found in one lake near Mexico City and grows up to 16" long.

I think they are kind of cool looking

I’ve heard them called snot otters.

I heard both names for same animal.

Yeah, water dogs and mud puppies.

Water dogs mud puppys are completely different species from hellbenders

Hellbenders hunt predomenently crayfish and act as an apex predator in their ecosystems. They are also a great key stone species and you can tell how healthy an ecosystem is based on how the hellbender population is doing. Also they are just pretty cool if you ask me.

The boost is to create a decent adult population while they work on fixing the issues causing the young to be unable to survive. They can also come back and remove the eggs to raise young in the future.

Arkansas actually has its own species of hellbender called the Ozark Hellbender! Though they dont get as big as Eastern Hellbenders.

A water dog is actually a different species, but they can live in similar habitats!

These type of Hellbenders only live around the Appalachia area unfortunetly, but Arkansas has its own smaller species called the Ozark hellbender!