Kentucky has named the Eastern hellbender its official state amphibian. The legislation was tacked onto a bill naming the Treeing Walker Coonhound as the official state dog of Kentucky, and signed into law by Gov. Andy Beshear on April 27, 2026.
While the state dog designation drew headlines, it's a slimy, giant salamander sometimes called a 'snot otter,' 'lasagna lizard,' 'Allegheny alligator' and other creative nicknames, that has scientists at Thomas More University in Northern Kentucky more interested.
The college's Biology Field Station recently received a grant from the National Wildlife Federation and Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom program to boost its hellbender research programs.
"We are getting ready to start what's called a Head Start program, which means that our collaborators collect eggs from the wild, hatch those and then raise the juveniles up for about three years and then release them right back to the streams from which they came," explains Chris Lorentz, PhD., a professor of biological sciences at Thomas More and director of the Biology Field Station.
North America's largest salamander used to be plentiful across Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana, among other states, but populations have dropped alarmingly over the past decades. In December 2024, the federal U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released a proposal to officially declare them endangered.
"This is one of our signature species in the Ohio River Basin, in the Tri-State area. Historically, streams throughout Ohio, Indiana, and Northern Kentucky had hellbenders. We have historic records of them. We have occasional sightings of them. But with habitat degradation, water quality deterioration, we've lost most of our hellbenders," says Lorentz. "They were once common to this area, and they're in decline, and, in many streams, are absent altogether."
Thomas More's hellbender husbandry program has been going on for half a dozen years. Lorentz says they're trying to learn about how to manage captive populations of hellbenders so they can raise the salamanders more successfully in captivity for release into the wild.
"The end goal is to recover the species," he says.
Understanding water quality is key to making that happen.
"Hellbenders are really symbolic of the health of streams. They're called 'bio-indicators'. Where you have hellbenders, you have lots of species diversity. They indicate water quality; where there's hellbenders, (there's) high water quality and vice versa."
Lorentz points to a recent study in Kentucky that studied water samples from 90 sites across the state, looking for environmental DNA, or eDNA, from hellbenders. Unlike other salamanders that spawn in the water then live on land, hellbenders live their lives entirely in the water. Hellbenders are nocturnal and like to live under big slabs of rocks, making them hard to find without the help of eDNA.
Only 22 sites tested positive for hellbender eDNA.
"We know that the populations have declined upwards of 70%, including in Kentucky," says Lorentz. "The goal is captive management — take eggs, raise the larvae, flip the survival rate from 10% in the wild to 90% in the lab, re-release these animals and hopefully build up some breeding populations."
Lorentz says a lot of places raise hellbenders with variable success. He says the goal of this study is to work out the best management practices to improve outcomes and reestablish wild populations. Currently only Thomas More, Kentucky Fish & Wildlife and Purdue University are studying hellbenders from this perspective, he says.
The year-long grant will help the field station modify its infrastructure and aquarium-like tanks to be able to monitor water quality more closely and thereby improve breeding outcomes. There's also funding for developing curricular materials about hellbenders for K-12 schools.
The Head Start program is set to launch that in the fall.
Some folks in Indiana have pushed for it to adopt the Eastern hellbender as the Hoosier State's official amphibian. The spotted salamander holds that title in Ohio.
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