After Helene, mountain river life rebounds

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by Tony Mecia

It’s a cool Friday morning just west of Boone, and Michael Gangloff is standing knee-deep in the Watauga River talking to nearly a dozen of his students.

The water is calm. A duck looks on from upstream.

Gangloff’s Appalachian State biodiversity class is taking measurements of the river – its width, depth, the speed of its current. Characteristics of rivers change over time, he tells the class.

He points to the bank of the river: “Helene pretty much annihilated the riparian zone here,” he says, referring to what would normally be a wet area covered with vegetation that is now mostly small boulders.

Hurricane Helene had a profound effect on western North Carolina’s rivers. Besides sweeping away houses, the deluge altered the course of flowing water, eroded river banks and introduced more sediment into stretches of rivers and streams. Initial readings showed troubling declines in animal life.

Concerns were felt most acutely for the eastern hellbender, a rare species that is North America’s largest salamander and can grow to more than two feet long. Before Helene, development and declining water quality had threatened the hellbender’s habitat, and researchers worried that the sediment from the storm had decimated its population.

But as with other aquatic animal life in the mountains, early worries about the hurricane’s effect proved to be overblown. Hellbenders might not have recovered everywhere, but they’re making progress throughout western North Carolina – so much so that they are increasingly becoming a symbol of mountain resiliency.

Boone’s downtown features a hellbender mural. Blowing Rock has a restaurant named after the species. And in Asheville, a riverside music venue opened this summer under the name Hellbender, with the owners saying they chose the name because of the salamander’s “longevity, adaptability and sensitivity to the health of the river ecosystems.”

“We have more people working on hellbender conservation now in North Carolina than ever before and have more public awareness, support and interest than at any time in the past,” said Lori Williams, a terrestrial species supervisor with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. “That will surely benefit the species going forward.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed designating the eastern hellbender as an endangered species in 2024, which would give it greater protections. The proposal has not been finalized. The salamander is found in 15 states, including North Carolina.

Overall, as is the case with other species found in rivers, the hurricane’s effect on hellbenders is a “mixed bag,” Williams said. In some of the hardest hit rivers, there appear to be fewer than before. Elsewhere, though, the numbers are more encouraging, with the big salamanders “still trying to breed and nest and do their important hellbender business, so there’s hope for recovery, even in damaged rivers.”

On the Watauga, Gangloff’s class saw no hellbenders on its visit, though the amphibian’s preference for hanging out under large boulders at the river bottom can make them hard to spot. Had the class encountered a hellbender, students would not have posted social-media selfies or otherwise publicized the location because of collectors or curious visitors who might disturb the habitat.

Gangloff says there are plenty of other threats to hellbenders, including stocking rivers with trout and smallmouth bass, which can eat hellbender larvae.

“They were at the top of the food chain, but we’ve changed that dramatically with the introduction of game fishes,” he says. 

In Asheville, UNC Asheville professor David Gillette had a stream ecology class taking measurements in the Swannanoa River watershed a week before Helene.

When they returned to the same spot after the storm, their measurements showed that the number of fish had dropped to worrisome levels.

But since then, numbers have rebounded. Gillette theorizes that rather than being wiped out initially, fish just headed to different places. 

“I was pretty surprised at how fast everything came back,” he said.

There have been some more permanent shifts. Some streams follow new courses.

People rafting on the French Broad River outside Asheville used to pull to the side and jump from a rock into a popular swimming hole, Gillette says. Now, though, that spot is only two feet deep.

Gillette says people sometimes ask him what species was affected the most by Helene. He likes to point back to the previous big flood in Asheville in 1916, known as the Great Flood. 

What most people don’t realize, he says, is that “100 years in evolutionary time is really not a lot of time.” Species in the river had experienced floods before and rebounded.

“What species was affected most by the storm? It was us,” he says. “We were the species that was affected the most.”

A version of this article originally appeared in The Charlotte Ledger.

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