Rae [00:00:00]: In this episode, we took a trip to a place that's quite near and dear to the Wild Kingdom family.
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TV Host [00:00:06]: And now from the world-renowned Saint Louis Zoological Gardens.
Marlin Perkins [00:00:10]: Welcome to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom.
Justin M. Elden [00:00:13]: We're incredibly proud of Marlin getting his start here at the Saint Louis Zoo, and we want to continue his legacy of protecting wild animals and wild places.
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Rae [00:00:26] It wasn't until we arrived in Saint Louis that I learned that that was his spot in particular. The Saint Louis Zoo was a place where he was a director. He really got his start in conservation, and he made tremendous change. But it's extra special knowing that you actually knew Marlin, Peter. And you can really speak to who he was and how he did all that great work.
Peter [00:00:48] He was incredible, and he was the first who would stand at the Saint Louis Zoo with a squirming reptile in his hand and very comfortably turn to camera and explain why this animal should be preserved and why you shouldn't fear it and just how important it is. Nothing alarmed Marlin as long as he was teaching us about the animals that resided in the zoo.
Rae [00:01:10] The Saint Louis Zoo was a predictable home for the original Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom series. But the creature we'll be discussing today is anything but ordinary.
Peter [00:01:21] I'm Peter Gros, wildlife expert and educator.
Rae [00:01:24] And I'm wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn Grant. And this is Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom The Podcast. Episode 9: A Day in the Life of a Zookeeper.
Peter [00:01:46] Lots of times on the podcast, we're talking with people who work with fairly well-known creatures sharks, beavers, bats, for this episode. Well, that's not the case.
Rae [00:01:58] Today, we're looking at a creature that I personally knew basically nothing about before we did an episode about them for Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom: Protecting The Wild.
Peter [00:02:07] And some people call it a “snot otter,” but mostly, this amphibian goes by the semi-alarming name of Hellbender.
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Jeff Briggler [00:02:15] Well, Ozark Hellbender is a large aquatic salamander that can get about 16 to 20 inches inside. So they have a big flat head like a pancake, wrinkly skin all down their sides, and they have a large rudder-like tail for swimming, and four limbs to walk with.
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Rae [00:02:30] You know, Peter, there's something special about people like you and me where we can take an animal in our hands that's actually called a snot otter and kind of really enjoy it. I mean, I remember picking up one of the larger-sized ones that was maybe like a foot long, and I looked at it in its face, and I thought, oh, you poor thing, you don't deserve all those nicknames. It was kind of sweet. I mean, slimy but sweet.
Peter [00:02:55] It was indeed slimy, which is where I think the name came from. I remember the first time I reached when it sort of squirted out of my hand like a banana out of a peel [laughs] and then was able to grab it again, but and then looking at that flat head needed for crawling under a rock in this odd looking thing, I mean, it's no wonder when early settlers saw that and wondering where could it have possibly come from? Thu, the name Hellbender.
Rae [00:03:22] Poor things.
Peter [00:03:24] Poor thing, yes.
Rae [00:03:25] The Ozark hellbender is native to the Saint Louis Zoo's backyard in Missouri, and like other amphibians worldwide who breathe underwater through their skin, hellbenders are at risk of extinction because they're incredibly vulnerable to pollution, habitat loss, and climate change.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf: [00:03:43] They're very big indicators of water health. This is water that most people in Saint Louis are recreationally using. So we would not want to be spending our summer vacation float trips in contaminated water.
Peter [00:03:58] Our guest today is Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf. She's a hellbender Zookeeper at the Saint Louis Zoo, and she regards Hellbenders as an indicator species, which means so goes the hellbender, so goes the river.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:04:12] So you can think of a common analogy as a canary in a coal mine. So that is what we think of as the hellbenders for the rivers that we're in. So if there's something in the river that is toxic or dangerous, a hellbender is so sensitive to their surroundings that they would show signs of distress or problems before, hopefully before people get there. But with so few hellbenders left in the wild, we're kind of– we don't have that opportunity. We've lost our canaries in the coal mine. So that's where we have the zoo and the Department of Conservation come in, where we are trying to repopulate those hellbenders and make healthier, better rivers for everybody.
Peter [00:04:51] Patty has been working with the Hellbenders at the Saint Louis Zoo for ten years, but despite having grown up in Saint Louis, she didn't know what they were until she started working with them. In fact, there was a time when Patty's career could have gone in an entirely different direction.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:05:06] When I went to college, I actually was a psychology major. I thought I was going to do some sort of sports psychology or counseling. Freshman year, I took some psychology classes, and I just didn't love it. It wasn't what I wanted to do. It wasn't for me. Almost all of my friends at the time were biology majors. I saw how hard their intro biology classes were, and I said, “I'm never going to do that. You couldn't make me. You guys are struggling so hard.” Sophomore year, I switched to biology. I declared– I declared my major [laughs] Maybe four months after going on the record and saying I'll never be a biology major.
Rae [00:05:42] Yeah, never say never. I mean, that is interesting. And then, you know. So what would your advice be to young Patty?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:05:49] Don't limit yourself.
Rae [00:05:50] These days, Patty, just like everyone we met at the zoo's hellbender conservation program, is obsessed with these little guys.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:05:58]: What's that quote? If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. That definitely feels right.
Peter [00:06:04]: I think Rae and I can relate to that quote. You know, a lot of people haven't been to the Saint Louis Zoo. Can you give us an idea of what it's like and what your daily routine might be like?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:06:15] Yeah. So the Saint Louis Zoo, just from a visitor's perspective, is a beautiful big park, we're about 90 acres. We have over 16,000 animals at the zoo, about 2000 of which are hellbenders.
Rae [00:06:28]: That's a pretty impressive ratio, would you say, right? 16,000 animals at the zoo, but 2000 of them are delightful hellbenders.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:06:34] Yes. We've had almost 4000 at one time or another, so we definitely take up a larger number. I think it's us and then the invertebrate team are competing for who has the highest percentage of animals at the zoo, but we'll share that space with them.
Peter [00:06:50] You know, we're just casually talking about the hellbender, and I think a lot of people have no idea what the heck a hellbender is. What are they?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:06:59] A hellbender is a large aquatic salamander. They are a type of amphibian, so they're closely related to frogs. It can be about two, two, and a half pounds on the biggest end. They have a large, flat body, so they can really hide under rock crevices. They have big lasagna size– so if you think of a sheet of lasagna pasta, that's what the side of a hellbender looks like. They use all of those extra ruffles or folds for oxygen intake so they do breathe through their skin, fully aquatic. They don't surface for air. They do have lungs, but they are going to be fully aquatic and use their skin for respiration. So they will hang out all the time in the water and when they're babies. This is my favorite part of a hellbender. When they are babies, they have external gills, so they have little frilly gills. A lot of kids know what an axolotl is, so you can kind of think of it in that regard, is that they have those big, fluffy external gills, and they're very beautiful, and that helps them with their oxygen intake when they're little.
Peter [00:07:55] So why does this lasagna-looking large, two-and-a-half pound salamander have the name hellbender?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:08:03] Hellbenders have been on the Earth for over 160 million years.
Rae [00:08:07] So before lasagna?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf[00:08:11] Yes. So they really should have changed the name of the pasta.
Peter: Yeah.
Rae [00:08:13]: I was going to say I think the pasta was modeled after the salamander.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:08:17] I do probably think that the noodle was created before somebody fully discovered the hellbender. But the story goes that a hellbender was just crawling out from under a rock in the depths of the river, and it looked like they were crawling up from the depths of hell. Is what they say. Is that the true story? I don’t know, but that’s what they say.
Rae [00:08:35] The Saint Louis Zoo has established a pioneering breeding program in an effort to save the hellbender from extinction. They've built a self-contained stream where they can regulate the water quality and temperature, making sure it's always safe for Hellbenders to live and breed.
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Justin M. Elden [00:08:51] When it comes to the breeding of Hellbenders. This is where we do that. So these are outdoor stream systems that replicate a Ozark River as closely as possible to make sure these animals are feeling comfortable enough to where they'll actually reproduce for us here at the zoo. So everything in here is as natural as we can make it, from the water quality to the water temperature. And even the rocks that we have in here are from the Ozark Plateau of Missouri.
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Rae [00:09:17] They have hellbenders of all ages and stages of development at the Zoo's Center for Hellbender Conservation, from those of breeding age to newborn eggs to older adults who are preparing to be released into the wild. That means an elaborate system of tanks and streams.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:09:35] You’d walk into one of four temperature-controlled rooms. We keep the hellbender rooms at about 62 to 60 degrees year-round. You would smell a little bit of chlorine. We use a lot of bleach for disinfectant purposes for disease prevention in our collection at the zoo. So a lot of people describe it as smelling like a swimming pool area. There's lots of flowing water. We have an indoor stream inside and in one of our rooms, so you'd hear lots of filtration. We have many different rack systems, so we keep hellbenders in fish tanks. So you would see lots of hellbenders everywhere. They– in the wild would like to hide under rocks, big rock crevices, or rock piles because rocks are quite heavy. We actually do a lightweight version of providing them with hide. So we use PVC tubes, so normal plumbing tubes that everyone would have in their home. And then we actually use tiles. So backsplash tiles or kitchen tiles, but giving them lots of semi-naturalistic places to hide. They have a nice flat body. So they like to go underneath of rocks or in those tiles in captivity, and that we're kind of training them to look for hiding spaces when they get out into the wild.
Peter [00:10:45] But during our visit to Saint Louis, I decided, why not try and look for these hellbenders hiding under the rocks in the wild? I went with Missouri State herpetologist Jeff Briggler out to the Ozarks. We spent hours searching for the Hellbenders.
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Peter [00:11:02]: They've got to be here somewhere.
Jeff Briggler [00:11:03] This looks like an ideal rock for an adult hellbender to be under right here. That's a big flat seated down really well. There's not one here, I'm going to be disappointed, There was a line under bed, I don't know.
Peter [00:11:18]: I can't believe there wasn't one under there either. I mean, there used to be a lot easier isn't it?
Jeff Briggler [00:11:22]: By far. Back in the '70s and '80s, they would find a hellbender here about every four surface rock. Oh my gosh, it takes me about 100 to even get one.
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Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:11:33] Hellbender populations have declined about 70 or 80% in the last 40 years or so. As far as I understand it, the Hellbenders are declining for a multitude of reasons, whether that be water quality, climate change can affect hellbenders, but also a big one it would be deforestation, and clearcutting the riverbanks to expand them or change the habitat, you know, make more room for houses. There's lots of residential areas along our rivers that are altering the substrate of the river. So if we're cutting away all the trees on the banks, there's more siltation, there's more mud, there's more, you know, dirt, sand, pea-sized gravel. Kind of changing the landscape so the hellbenders have less places to hide or less viable places for juvenile hellbenders to survive. Also, in Missouri, we've had a lot of flooding in the last few years. In the the ten years that I've been at the zoo, I have heard the term 20-year flood, 100-year flood, 40-year flood about four times. You're not supposed to be having flooding that bad on a 100-year flood magnitude multiple times in a decade. So that is also changing. These floods are taking out highway overpasses. They're completely decimating people's homes. And then the next time I went on a Hellbender release, there's just so much debris. Giant boulders have been moved around from nature. There's house parts and kitchen things everywhere, and it's just really affecting the hellbender habitat and giving them less options of safe places to be.
Peter [00:13:09] Rivers are so popular, especially in the summer, with the tubing and the rafting and the kayaking. What should one do? If you came upon hellbender.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:13:17] You can notify whatever campground or park you're in. You can let the rangers in that area or the game and fish wardens in that area know, especially if you're fishing and you've accidentally caught a hellbender. So because they are federally protected, it is illegal to take hellbenders out of the river. It's also illegal to actually search for hellbenders, so we don't want anyone lifting, looking, doing any sort of surveying on their own. That is a federal crime.
Rae [00:13:46] So leave them alone, I mean Peter and I, we're with the authorities.
Peter [00:13:51] Supervising us very carefully.
Rae: Very, very carefully.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:13:53] Yes. And you and you guys would have been on the permits if you find one. Well done. They're not that many.
Rae [00:14:02]: Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever accidentally come upon a hellbender?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:14:06] No, I have not. I have also not had very good luck on my surveying trips, much like it sounds like Peter had a long day on the river, with not a lot of hellbenders to show for it.
Rae [00:14:18] Tell us about the eggs. I did not personally when we were filming this episode, I did not encounter any eggs, although I did encounter little tiny baby Hellbenders. But what are the eggs like?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:14:28] So a hellbender female can lay anywhere from two to up to four hundred eggs, depending on how large she is.
Rae [00:14:34] At one time?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:14:35] Yeah, they come out and like a little string of connected pearls almost. They are, but they're first laid there, probably around dime-sized. You can see through them. They have a clear membrane so you can see the yolk. We can watch it develop.
Peter [00:14:49] If they were to produce those in the wild, what might be predation on them?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:14:53] Crayfish will happily eat a hellbender egg. Sadly, an adult hellbender will also happily eat hellbender eggs. We did have an animal at the zoo who would not breed, but he was in a breeding situation, and he would eat the other eggs before we could pull him out of the stream. So we do bring the eggs inside. That way, we can just keep an eye on them.
Peter [00:15:14] Let's assume it's a hellbender that does not get eaten by crayfish or other hellbenders or predators. Do we have an idea of what the life expectancy could be?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:15:23] So there was an animal long ago. In the 1970s, it was not uncommon for scientists to brand an animal like how you would brand cattle.
Rae [00:15:32] Things have changed.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:15:33] Yes. We have since evolved into using pet tags. So, the same type of tag that a dog or cat gets. But there's an animal in the '70s that was branded, and then that animal was caught in the early 2000s. That animal was probably 40 years old, not quite sure, but we think that's somewhere around the that top life expectancy is 40-50 years old, and we don't have any animals at the zoo that we have had that long.
Rae [00:15:59] Well, and that really sets your zoo apart. And I think a lot of folks don't necessarily know that sometimes, in zoos, the animals are only there for a short time, and ultimately, they go back into the wilderness and are never in captivity again. So that impressed me so much. When I was at the Saint Louis Zoo, and Peter and I were doing this hellbender episode where I think we took the largest female that you all had at the time. And her name was Meredith, and she had had a lot of clutches of eggs. And we brought her back to, you know, to the wild.
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Rae [00:16:33]: She is a breeder, so she has been at the Zoo for 12 or 13 years, laid thousands of eggs. And she has been influential in making Hellbender conservation a successor.
Jeff Briggler [00:16:48] She produced a lot of babies, and it's time for her to move on so we can increase genetic diversity by adding some new ones.
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Rae [00:16:56] It was a really special moment. I mean, the fact that she even had this name and she had mothered all these hellbenders and helped to restore the species. It was just awesome.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:17:05] Releasing Hellbenders is by far the best part of our jobs. But then you get that added layer of Meredith, who had bred multiple times and was one of the original eggs that we brought in from the wild in the early 2010s. That's great. She lived at the zoo. She did what we needed her to do, and she did it so well. And now she's back out in the wild, hopefully continuing to do the same things. So when I started part-time, that we bred Hellbenders in 2015; that fall, a few years later, I'm releasing animals that I helped take care of when they first hatched. So there's all these fun layers of a release is the best part. And then you add in all these extra little special moments that make every release special and different in a new way.
Peter [00:17:52]: I think it's great to hear that attachment. What surprised me is they had spent their entire lives so far until they were deemed healthy and strong enough to be released as we let them go in the bottom, and I watched one look for the appropriate place, crawl under a rock, turn, and face upstream where they might be waiting for crustaceans to come by. And it knew exactly what to do, even though they had never spent more than two minutes in the wild. That just blew me away.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:18:20] Yes, they are surprisingly resilient and much smarter, I think, than people give them credit for. They do have silly little nuances to them, of course, like any animal. But there's nothing better in our jobs than doing those releases.
Rae [00:18:34] For folks who maybe saw our episode and now love hellbenders just like we do. They might want to know, like, well, how can I at home help Hellbenders, right? And we touched on some things like maybe, you know if you're going to do some building or development in a river area, you know, try to make sure that you're conscious of hellbender habitat. But are there other ways?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:18:56] Definitely. If you do use any of our major rivers in the summertime, just being respectful of that habitat, not leaving it a mess, cleaning up your trash, you know, keeping it, keeping it clean and pristine in that way is great. I know people like to take the rocks and stack them up and make those rock towers in the river. That is just taking away good habitat options for a lot of aquatic animals. So, just being mindful of nature, leave it ideally better than you found it, but definitely leave it as you found it.
Rae [00:19:28] Well, Patty, okay, you have so much to say about Hellbenders. This is frickin awesome. And okay, here's a question. So, do you frequently do media work on these hellbenders?
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:19:40] The Zoo does do a really great job of promoting our successes. The Zoo also does do a very great job of communicating with the community, even on things that are actually maybe a little sad or the passing of animals and stuff. So I think the city really loves the zoo for a lot of different reasons. So it's a fun, good cycle, right? They love our media, so we put more media out there. We have had a lot of milestones over the last 20 years, so we are constantly bragging about our successes. Zoos are a wonderful place for people to just come look at the animals, but also, we are saving the world as best we can, so we like to brag about ourselves.
Peter [00:20:21]: That's such a great thing to hear too. I think that you're not really bragging. You're just sharing the information because so many people's perception about zoos is that it's a place to go. Look at animals, make your first connection with wildlife, and see them up close. People don't really have much of a clue about all the good things you do behind the scenes and the breeding of captive and endangered species, and the release of endangered species, and the programs that are going on. So I just say, don't consider it bragging, just help us spread the word of all the good things that are happening.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:20:54] I agree it's I'm very proud to work at the zoo. People in Saint Louis are, in the best way, obsessed with the zoo. I go off grounds for lunch, and I talk to somebody at the restaurant about the zoo and how great it is. I go to pick up my groceries after work in my uniform, and at least three people have to stop and talk about the zoo, talk about the new cool thing we did. Every time I get the opportunity to teach someone what a hellbender is.
Rae [00:21:30: It was really touching getting a sense of Marlin Perkins's legacy when we were at the Saint Louis Zoo. But Patty clued us into one piece of his history, that was news to us.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:21:41] I don't know if you guys found this out on your tour while you were filming the episode at all, but Marlin Perkins did have a run-in with a gaboon viper. One Thanksgiving morning, many, many, many years ago, and was hospitalized from a bite from a gaboon viper. So we do have that gaboon viper saved. It has since passed away. This is a very long time ago, but we do have that specimen preserved behind the scenes in the herpetarium too.
Peter [00:22:06] Wow! That's a great story. I've never heard that before.
Rae [00:22:09] Oh my gosh, thank you for that insight. And Patty, thank you for joining us today.
Patty Ihrig-Bueckendorf [00:22:14] Yes, thank you for having me.
Peter [00:22:18] Indicator species, like the Hellbenders of the Ozarks, can provide important information on the health of their environments. Conservation heroes like Patty and the work of the Saint Louis Zoo are vital to ensuring magical moments in the wild kingdom for future generations.
Rae [00:22:36] Join us next week when we speak with Regina Mossoti to learn why she's dedicated so much of her life to wolf conservation.
Regina Mossoti [00:22:44] Animals that were misunderstood always stood out to me. I guess I related to them somehow, and that translated as I grew into loving carnivores and especially wolves because they really get a bad rep and are completely misunderstood. It was an easy thing for me to say. You know what? This is what I want to dedicate my life to.
Rae [00:23:04] That's next week on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the podcast.
Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom The Podcast is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and Mutual of Omaha.
Our Senior Producer is Stephen Key.
Producers are Xandra Ellin and Jenny Van Soelen
Associate Producer is Lisa Cerda.
Editor is Darby Maloney.
Executive Producers are Bari Finkel, Gabrielle Lewis, and Jen Wulf.
Pineapple’s Head of Sound & Engineering is Raj Makhija. Senior Audio Engineers are Marina Paiz, Davy Sumner, Javi Cruces, and Pedro Alvira. Additional engineering by Rob Miller and Jason Richards.
This Episode was mixed by Davy Sumner.
Production Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound and Hearst Media Production Group.
Episode Clips courtesy of Hearst Media Production Group.
Fact checking by Justine Daum.
Marketing and Promotion by Emily Poeschl.
This podcast is hosted by me, Rae Wynn-Grant.
And me, Peter Gros.
Special thanks to Katelyn Williams, Sophie Radmilovich, and Stephanie Diaz
Today’s episode is based on the Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom series created by Don Meier. Our next episode will be out in a week. Make sure to listen on the Audacy app, or wherever you get your podcasts.
