- This is a rescue mission.

- There's a main line of rocks that will hit and we can show you that haven't done it.

How to look for them in there.

- We have to do some bouldering up through there and again just some narrow passages - Climbing over trees and under trees and up the remains of a landslide.

- Be careful.

See what we can find.

- The team is scrambling to save the Hickory Nut Gorge Green Salamander.

It is one of the rarest salamanders in the world.

- Our best estimates over years of doing surveys put the total number in the wild at like 3 to 500 individuals.

- And it's an endemic species.

It only lives in tiny pockets in the Hickory Nut Gorge in the Western North Carolina mountains.

- So we're talking about an extremely endangered salamander here that's in our backyard and without intervention is likely to go extinct in my lifetime.

- JJ Apodaca, the executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, discovered the Hickory Nut Gorge Green Salamander species in 2019.

- For me, that's a very personal mission and very important task to be working to save the species.

- The Hickory Nut Gorge is a 14 mile long ecological treasure.

Over eons of time, the Rocky Broad River carved the steep and narrow canyon through the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Hundreds of micro climates.

Small areas with unique temperatures, moistures and ecosystems are found throughout the landscape.

That's why 37 rare plant species and 14 rare animal species are found throughout the 20,000 acre gorge, including the critically endangered subject of the rescue mission.

- When you see them in their natural habitat, you can just totally picture why they evolved that way is because I mean they're perfectly blended in.

- Typically, you're going to find these salamanders in very tight moist, but not necessarily like wet crevices.

- But scientists are searching for the Hickory Nut Gorge Green Salamander because in September of 2024, Hurricane Helene pummeled the gorge with almost 2 feet of rain and high winds.

The salamanders perfect habitat became a death trap.

- Yeah.

- See it in there?

I don't easily get choked up, but I got pretty choked up walking in there 'cause it was such a beautiful site with just amazing understory vegetation.

Lots of beautiful native flowers and really probably old growth trees.

It was just wiped clean by a landslide.

- 'Cause we could do a hand line over here too.

- Oh, like back in there?

- Making things even more tragic, the Hickory Nut Gorge Green Salamander spends most of the summer in the trees, migrating down to rocks to breed in the fall just when Hurricane Helene slammed into the gorge.

- Luckily, females would have been in the rocks at this time, but males likely would have still been in the trees and a lot of those trees were knocked over.

A lot of those trees were cut in half, and so we might have lost a lot of the population just purely in the trees being taken out.

The reason this species is in such trouble is because we just had so few populations.

- Can you hop over -- can you get -- - When you have a species this close to the edge of extinction, every population is important and every population counts.

- I've got -- - Some crevices on the other side of this rock that are too tall for us to get to, so Jen's going to anchor and repel.

- There was so much rain, it created rivers and landslides that came down the mountain which took out all the trees and because it's a salamander, it depends on A, the trees they they go up and they forge.

They go up and they feed in the trees.

But also those trees provide a lot of moisture in the air and keep the temperatures down so the Gorge is relatively hot for salamanders.

It's only at 1000 feet and so they require those kind of cooler moisture areas.

These salamanders are completely lungless, so all of their respiration has to occur across their skin.

All their breathing, all their gas exchange just happens across their skin.

The downside of that is that you have to have moist skin, so if you are out in the sun, you dry out, you can't breathe.

Not breathing is bad, so this is a great example of this was just like an amazing canopy tree.

And if you look up here, the whole thing is broken off.

So while there are still trees around, almost all of them are broken off and the canopy is completely gone.

So now it's totally open to the sun and this site is changed for decades.

- Natural disturbances within the forest happen all the time, and in a sense that's a good thing.

It brings new life into the forest.

It brings a different age class.

Of trees into the force, and that's just the natural succession.

Unfortunately, these canopy openings which provide sunlight and the right ingredients for native plants to thrive also provide those ingredients for non natives to really take over.

They don't have any predators, so they will outcompete the natives and they will basically just swallow up the landscape.

- So in a last ditch attempt to save the Hickory Nut Gorge Green salamander from extinction, Apodaca is leading an effort to capture salamanders in the gorge and bring them to the North Carolina Zoo to start a captive breeding program.

- In our back area we have this room set up where we have its own air conditioning system.

We have our own filtered water and we're setting up these kind of tiny micro habitats and then it will be loaded with rocks that are stacked up and these are considered a crevice dwelling species so they live most their lives in rock crevices.

Every once in awhile they'll come out and climb trees, but there's a lot we really don't know about this species.

We try to provide a substrate that's similar to what they would experience in the wild, but also all these different rock crevices that have the same sort of microclimates and micro habitat they would experience in the wild.

- 25 salamanders were rescued from the gorge to start the program.

It took multiple trips to find them and the program will be slow going, - Salamanders only lay about 10 eggs per year and they don't reach sexual maturity until age 7.

Salamanders can live 20 to 30 years in the wild.

- Most of the plants and the rocks and even some of the props like the bark we actually collected from the site itself so they truly are experiencing a little miniature version of what they had in the wild.

- It's as exact as you can possibly make it.

- It's next to impossible to duplicate it, but we're pretty close.

- The long term goal is to return these salamanders to the wild.

- We need a sufficient number to get out in the wild and we want to make sure that we're not damaging what we do have as far as a population in captivity.

We certainly want to get him back out in the wild, but we've also never done that.

No one's done that for this species, and so reintroducing them is also going to be a learning curve and it's going to take time for us to probably get that right.

You know, for me, the hard line is always extinction.

I think it, you know, extinction is forever is the saying.

I believe that when we lose a species, we lose millions of years of evolutionary history.

We lose something special in the world that we can never bring back.

So for me, that's always the hard line is that we don't let anything go extinct and we put in effort.

- Thanks for watching.

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