SUNTIMES NEWS (Perryville, Missouri) 26 July 05 Citizens offer insights about hellbenders (Jim Low, Missouri Department of Conservation)
Lebanon: Clifford Keith and Chris Liesman are miles apart in geography and experience. However, they have a common interest in an uncommon animal and the rivers they love. Their stories reflect concerns for both.
Keith, 74, is a lifelong resident of eastern Dallas County. As a youth, he fished the Niangua River and guided paying clients who came to catch smallmouth bass, goggle-eye and trout. He still fishes the river for pleasure and does a little guiding.
Liesman, 48, grew up fishing and guiding clients on the middle section of the Gasconade River. Although his work as a general contractor took him to the St. Louis area 20 years ago, he recently returned to buy a cabin near Jerome. Weekends find him and his family on the Gasconade River once again, casting for smallmouths and setting trotlines for channel catfish.
Keith and Liesman have never met, but they both read news stories about the hellbender, Cryptobranchus alleganiensis, a giant salamander. The animal is in decline, and the Missouri Department of Conservation urges people to report hellbender sightings. Both men have seen hellbenders, so they called Conservation Department herpetologist Jeff Briggler.
"I used to see them everywhere when I would go gigging," said Keith when he called in his report. "Most of the places where they used to be are gone now. At the rate we're going, they won't be here for long."
The places where Keith used to see hellbenders were the same ones preferred by smallmouth bass, goggle-eye and trout - deep water where a steady flow of cold, oxygen-rich water washed over rocks ranging in size from basketballs to Volkswagens. He was eager to show someone from the Conservation Department what is happening to such places.
Keith met Briggler early on the morning of July 11 at Bennett Spring Access at Highway 64. Clad in blue-and-white pinstriped bib overalls and a floppy, brimmed hat, he clearly was at home on this river, where his family has lived for generations. The retired businessman now has a small herd of black Angus cattle.
Keith said hellbenders, which he calls by the local name "water dogs," used to be a common sight on the Niangua.
"Sometimes you'd go gigging at night and you wouldn't see no fish. If the moon was a-showin' and the fish was hid, you'd see water dogs everyplace."
Keith's custom-made aluminum canoe wasn't even in the water yet when he pointed out the first of several problems he believes plague the Niangua River.
A bulldozer had made half a dozen 30-foot wide cuts in the steep bank across from the boat ramp, making it easier to launch and land canoes. Upstream, several hundred yards of gently sloping river bank and adjacent bottom land had been bulldozed down to bare gravel subsoil.
Keith said such development in the Niangua River flood plain has caused huge amounts of gravel to wash into the river, filling in holes.
"Right down through here, the water used to be 8 or 10 foot deep; you can wade it now," Keith said ruefully.
Briggler, who has visited the site to count hellbenders for years, confirmed that the hole along the Bennett Spring Access once was the best hellbender habitat on the Niangua River. Gravel inundation has erased the habitat, and along with it, the hellbenders.
Launching the canoe, they left behind the scene - but not the phenomenon. The river was beautiful, with mist rising from the swirling water, birdsong cascading from overhanging trees and the air perfumed by buttonbush blossoms. But around every bend, Keith pointed to new gravel bars and holes whose depth he said had decreased by half or more due to gravel deposition:
"That used to be over your head. The flood last spring filled it all up. . .
"Down there where the water dogs used to lay, you could see 50 at one time. Now it's filled up with gravel. . .
"That big gravel bar there slid in a year ago. It used to only be 10 feet wide. . .
"Everybody used to come to this hole to fly-fish. The water was over your head, and you could catch 18- or 20-inch brown trout. Now there's nothin'."
Keith said it is only a matter of time until gravel chokes all the deep holes downstream from Bennett Spring. At the head of one surviving hole, he pointed out a tongue of light-colored gravel snaking along the bedrock bottom. With the next pulse of floodwater, he predicted, the following slug of gravel would slide on downriver, swallowing up nooks and crannies now inhabited by hellbenders and fish.
A mile or two downriver from Bennett Spring, Briggler noted with dismay a new resort, with deluxe cabins situated less than 50 yards from the river's edge. The spot is one where he has found as many as 10 hellbenders in the past. Now, with protective vegetation gone, the river is gouging into the exposed bank, releasing tons of gravel.
"This was just done recently, before the flood we had this spring," said Keith. "Any time you fool with those banks with a 'dozer, you're asking for trouble. With the bank eroding like that, it won't be long until the river is up to their buildings."
Drifting downriver, Keith pointed out another change in the river. Scores of trees whose roots once held river banks in place lay on their sides. Upturned root wads littered the water on both sides of the river. They left raw wounds in the river banks from which they had fallen.
In some spots, downed trees were so numerous that canoeists have to get out and walk their craft through the mazes of tangled roots.
Keith blames increasing traffic on the river for the loss of trees. Pointing to bare roots at the water line, he suggested that the waves from boats increase the rate of bank erosion. Special motors up to 100 hp can propel boats through a few inches of water by means of powerful water jets. They churn up the stream bottom and kick up large wakes that crash into the shoreline day after day.
Keith is philosophical about jet boats, however. "I quit worrying about 'em. After another flood, the river's gonna fill up with gravel so they can't get in here anymore."
Both Keith and Briggler commented on the fact that the Niangua's water, normally crystal clear at this time of year, had a pronounced green color due to algae growth. The tint was dark enough to make steering the canoe around rocks and stumps difficult.
"There's a lot of reasons for it," Keith said after noting these signs of change. Most of the reasons he cited were related to increasing recreational use of the river.
According to Keith, declining water quality has paralleled the exponential increase in canoe traffic and accelerating development in the river's flood plain. A few years ago, he said, hundreds of canoeists used the Niangua River on summer weekends. Now their numbers run in the thousands.
"Those people have to go to the bathroom somewhere. There are no toilets on the river, so where do they go? In the river. They've got to."
Briggler said another major contributor to organic waste in the river is riverside cabins, resorts and other developments. Designing and installing septic systems that will contain waste in an area riddled with sinkholes, caves, losing streams and springs is difficult.
Although the Missouri Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Geological Survey conduct water-quality sampling on the Niangua River, neither collects samples in the area that Keith is concerned about, downriver from Bennett Spring Access. That makes it difficult to confirm Keith's and Briggler's theories. But waste from such sources would increase algae growth and decrease water quality. Hellbenders, which absorb oxygen through their skin, are especially sensitive to such changes.
Having showed Briggler the problems facing hellbenders and other bottom-dwelling wildlife on the Niangua River, Keith asked what the Conservation Department is going to do to solve them.
"That is a huge project," said Briggler, noting that the entire stream corridor needs to be protected from disturbance. Furthermore, he said, regulating canoe liveries and real-estate development is outside the agency's authority.
"Are you gonna turn some hellbenders loose in here?" Keith asked.
"No, said Briggler," shaking his head. "We can't even get them to reproduce in the wild, let alone in captivity. What we've got left in the river is what we've got to work with."
"Well, I've got faith in you'uns," said Keith. "I remember years ago when there weren't no deer or turkey. Used to be, you went down through here and you couldn't see nothin' but cans and bottles. And through the Conservation's efforts, now you don't see very many. They've cured that problem."
Leaving Keith, Briggler drove east to meet Liesman at his cabin on the Gasconade River. A burly giant of a man, Liesman wore cut-off camouflage shorts and a yellow tank top. A tail feather from a wild turkey festooned his camo hunter's hat. Relaxed and jovial, Liesman clearly is in his element on the river, renewing his Pulaski County roots.
He also remembers catching hellbenders constantly as a youth. The number has fallen off drastically in recent years. However, he caught three this spring on a trotline set for channel catfish.
"When I caught three water dogs I knew they were still hanging in here for some reason. Then I read about the Conservation Department looking for them and decided to call."
Liesman released all three of the hellbenders, but he worried about their chances for survival. All had swallowed hooks. Rather than risk injuring them while trying to remove the hooks, he simply cut the line as the Conservation Department recommends. He asked Briggler about this.
"Our studies show that it only takes a week or two for a hook to rust out of a hellbender's stomach," he said.
Liesman paddled his canoe to the exact spot where he caught the hellbenders. It was classic hellbender habitat, a 300-yard hole with water 4 to 8 feet deep beneath wooded bluffs. Hefty chunks of limestone lined the bank and the river bottom, creating ideal homes, not only for hellbenders but for smallmouth and Kentucky bass, goggle-eye and suckers.
Unlike the Niangua River below Bennett Spring, this stretch of the Gasconade River was not swimming in gravel, however. Commercial development is sparse here. The river lacks large springs like Bennett Spring, and while it has a well-earned reputation as a smallmouth stream, low summer flows have prevented it from becoming a canoeing Mecca.
Liesman's own cabin doesn't contribute to stream-bank erosion, due to its location well away from the water. Moss-covered rocks line the banks, a lush carpet for prowling minks and water thrushes.
In spite of all this, Briggler wasn't optimistic about finding hellbenders in the main pool. He showed why by tapping the top of a submerged rock with his canoe paddle. The action raised a cloud of fine mud particles.
"If a rock has silt like that on top of it, you're not gonna find a hellbender underneath," he said decisively. "They want a place with enough current to keep the bottom clean."
Briggler and Liesman both commented on the green cast of the river water. Like the Niangua 50 miles away, the Gasconade was experiencing an algae bloom, possibly because of an extended dry spell and above-average temperatures. The same conditions had reduced the river's flow, contributing to the silty conditions.
Briggler predicted that any hellbenders would be found at the head of the pool, where a shallow riffle provided lively current. Besides keeping the bottom clear of silt, the current mixes air and water in such areas, increasing the oxygen available to fish and amphibians.
To test his theory, he donned a wet suit, goggles and a snorkel and went in search of hellbenders. Poor visibility in the dingy water complicated the job, and a 45-minute search failed to turn up any of the big salamanders.
Briggler took a break and answered questions about Missouri's biggest salamander. He said hellbenders begin life as silvery-white eggs the size of nickels or quarters. Males fertilize the eggs by spraying them with a cloud of sperm as they emerge from females' bodies.
The eggs normally are in long strings, like huge pearls. The male guards the eggs for four to six weeks beneath a flat rock. The young are less than an inch long when they hatch. Their bodies are transparent, but they soon turn dark brown or black.
Young hellbenders have external gills, but they lose these at about two years of age. They grow an inch or two each year until they are 12 to 15 inches long. Growth slows after that, but they continue to grow their entire lives. Some top 20 inches.
Once they reach adult size, hellbenders have few predators. In captivity, hellbenders have survived 55 years. In the wild, they are thought to live at least 30 years, but like much of their life history, this is still a matter of conjecture.
Female hellbenders may produce as many as 700 eggs, but they don't begin breeding until they are 7 or 8 years old, and may only breed every second or third year.
Briggler promised to take Liesman up on his invitation to return and try to document the Gasconade River hellbender population when water conditions are more favorable. On the drive home, though, Briggler was discouraged.
"I'm even more disappointed after today. Seeing what is happening on the Niangua makes me wonder if there is any hope there. It's such a big problem, and things seem to be going downhill fast."
Briggler says he will keep trying, though. He remembers Keith's parting words.
"Some time or another in everything, somebody has to do something."
For more information about hellbenders, visit www.mdc.mo.gov/nathis/herpetol/ and click on "The Hellbender." Or, you can write to Missouri Department of Conservation, The Hellbender, P.O. Box 180, Jefferson City, MO 65102-0180, or e-mail pubstaff@mdc.mo.gov.
Citizens offer insights about hellbenders