There’s a secret wildlife wonderland hidden in the US — and it’s in danger

On a muggy afternoon in May, JJ Apodaca stared intently at a very large rock. Apodaca, a biologist with a salt-and-pepper faux-hawk, was looking for a creature that, to an untrained eye, might be impossible to find: a rare salamander that lives hidden in narrow crevices no larger than an inch wide.

Apodaca had an advantage in his search. He was among a group of scientists who first discovered the species — a lungless salamander known as the Hickory Nut Gorge green — several years ago. Scientists estimate that only about 500 to 600 of these creatures exist on the planet.

Apodaca peered into crevice after crevice with a penlight. I searched, too, though I was politely told that I was looking in the wrong-sized cracks.

About 20 minutes into our hunt, Apodaca, who leads a conservation group called the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, ushered me over to a crack he had been examining. I followed his beam to a small glistening mass tucked away in the shadows. It was a Hickory Nut Gorge green. 

Using a small twig, Apodaca coaxed the salamander out and delicately grabbed it with his hands. The animal was striking: black with messy splotches of lime green, as if it had crawled out of a paintball match.

“There it is,” said Apodaca, matter-of-factly, “one of the rarest salamanders in the world.” 

That morning, Apodaca and I were in a place called Hickory Nut Gorge. A rugged landscape carved of granite and blanketed with trees, the gorge is full of unique plants and animals including three species of salamanders that are endemic, meaning they’re found nowhere else in the world. Even some of the spiders we saw were unique to that forest, Apodaca told me. 

This kind of bountiful biodiversity might be expected of, say, the rainforests of South America or Southeast Asia. We, however, were in western North Carolina. The Hickory Nut Gorge is not far from Asheville, in the southern Appalachian Mountains.  

Stories about Appalachia are often focused on poverty — on what this region lacks — whether they promote or debunk false claims. But this region has an abundance of life. It has a rich diversity of plants and animals that you can’t find anywhere else. Indeed, Appalachia, and especially its southern stretches, is a biodiversity hotspot of global importance. 

And salamanders, a kind of nocturnal amphibian, are the unequivocal stars.

These mountains have a greater concentration of salamanders than any other place on the planet. In some forests, you can find well over 10,000 individuals of just one species in a chunk of land no larger than a football field. At least 100 salamander species live in Appalachia, earning it the title of “salamander capital of the world.” 

The Appalachian Mountains have had a complex and tumultuous history. A disregard for the value of ecosystems and the communities they support seeded decades of environmental destruction throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Companies cleared millions of trees and exploded the tops of mountains to feed the nation’s insatiable appetite for timber and coal.

Remarkably, salamanders, on the whole, have so far survived these threats. Although they may look fragile, they have adaptations forged by millions of years of evolution. This mountain range, and its iconic trail, remains a salamander mecca. 

But today, a new suite of threats looms, and they’re poised to overcome even the most clever adaptations to life in Appalachia.

How the US exploited Appalachia

Common narratives about people living in balance with nature typically revolve around Indigenous communities: tribes in the US, South America, and elsewhere. Those stories are rooted in reality, even if they’re often exoticized. That’s why environmental initiatives, including those that once forcefully excluded tribes, are increasingly looking to Indigenous practices as a model for conservation. 

In Appalachia, a diverse mountain region stretching from Alabama to eastern Canada, the narrative is similar — but it takes a slightly different turn. For hundreds of years, many Indigenous Appalachians, including the Cherokee people, had nature-based economies rooted in a respect for plants and animals. Yet white settlers, who first arrived in the 1700s, developed this sort of nature-based economy, too. They relied on ecosystems as sources of food and building materials, often picking up tips from the local Indigenous communities. 

That’s not to say it was peaceful; US military leaders, including settlers, forcefully removed thousands of Indigenous people, most notably during the Trail of Tears during the mid-1800s. But both communities had a strong cultural connection to the land.

For much of the last few centuries, settlers and their descendants treated forests as shared resources, as a place to harvest medicinal plants, fish, gather wood, and graze livestock, as historian and author Kathryn Newfont wrote in her 2012 book Blue Ridge Commons. Life obviously wasn’t always easy, but the mountain resources were plentiful. The natural abundance was a form of wealth. 

“People had an extremely rich environment,” said Steven Stoll, a historian at Fordham University and author of Ramp Hollow, a 2017 book that chronicles the economic history of the region. “They actually had what they needed most of the time.”

The turn of the 19th century, however, brought seismic changes across the country — and especially in Appalachia. 

Growing cities and factories in the burgeoning US demanded ever more coal and timber. Hardwood in New England and the Midwest had already been depleted, but it was still abundant in states like North Carolina and Tennessee. Meanwhile, Kentucky and West Virginia had a tremendous amount of coal. Seeing an opportunity to get rich, businessmen outside the region turned to Appalachia. (This is a brief distillation of a complicated history. I highly recommend the books by Stoll and Newfont to learn more.)

In the decades that followed, these industries pillaged much of central and southern Appalachia. Mining was particularly destructive. After knocking down trees, energy firms would literally blast the tops off mountains in search of coal seams, carelessly dumping rubble in nearby streams. Clearcutting decimated the lush landscape, too. 

“The southern mountain timber boom deforested the region on an enormous, nearly unimaginable scale,” Newfont writes. “It permanently changed the highland landscape by removing most of its irreplaceable centuries-old trees and subjecting what remained to a vicious cycle of fire and flood. Together these processes rendered whole sections of the mountain region nearly unrecognizable, some almost lunar in appearance.”

The wealth harvested from Appalachia did not stay in Appalachia. Profits flowed to big cities and overseas investors. And while Appalachian loggers and miners were paid a wage, they lost something priceless: their self-sufficiency, their ability to derive goods from the woods. Not only was much of the forest gone, but wage workers had little time to hunt, fish, and forage, said Brian Burke, a professor of sustainable development at Appalachian State University. “Over time, that reduces people’s stake in nature, their care for nature, their interaction with different parts of the landscape,” Burke said.

At the same time, the region’s wildlife, including salamanders, began to disappear. While the full impact of these industries isn’t clear, research shows mountaintop removal and clearcutting is, unsurprisingly, bad for biodiversity. Decades of research has found that clearcut or otherwise logged forests have far fewer salamanders than older groves of trees. A recent study of streams in West Virginia, meanwhile, found that mountaintop coal mining wiped out roughly 40 percent of animal life in downstream habitats. 

Today it’s almost impossible to find a spot in Southern Appalachia that hasn’t been cleared at some point in the past. Even Hickory Nut Gorge, much of which is now protected, including where we hiked, was logged in the 1900s, Apodaca said. 

A salamander wonderland

Yet the salamanders have held on — which is, in itself, astounding. 

“The fact that salamanders remain as diverse in this region as they are is really an amazing testament to nature,” Burke said. 

In some parts of Appalachia, salamanders are so abundant that their combined weight can exceed that of all other vertebrates, such as birds and snakes, put together, Apodaca said. While they only weigh a few ounces on average, forests have billions of them.

After spotting another green salamander in another crack at the gorge, we went up the trail to a different boulder. It was huge and covered in a furry, neon-green moss.  

Here, even I could spot salamanders. 

They were much bigger — about the length of my hand — and lying in large crevices. Not so cleverly known as crevice salamanders, they, too, were eye-catching with white polka dots and splotches of scarlet popping from their shiny dark bodies. Like the greens, these salamanders are found only in the gorge.

On hot days like this one, the gorge serves as a climate refuge. Some of the larger cracks connect to a cave, and they blow out cool air, like an outdoor air conditioner. That morning as we searched, we’d poke our heads into these fissures, spot some salamanders, and get blasted in the face by a delightful gust of cold air.

Later that week, Apodaca took me to another forest a bit farther from Asheville, near the Appalachian Trail. It was a full-blown amphibian metropolis.

We parked by a campsite that had a fire pit encircled by stumps. While Apodaca laced up his boots, I peered under the logs, and found a salamander or two under each of them.

The morning was like a return to childhood. As we hiked through the woods, we turned every log and every stone to see what treasure lurked beneath. Spoiler: It was always salamanders. 

The thrill came in seeing what kind and color. Some were purple with fire-red legs. Others were orange with speckles of white and brown. Under a piece of bark, Apodaca found a pygmy salamander no more than an inch long with pale, golden skin. Most rocks in a creek running through the forest hid blackbelly salamanders, mottled brown animals with protruding, frog-like eyes. 

In just a few hours, we had found something like 250 salamanders, Apodaca estimated. That’s not all: On the road into the forest, we also encountered two box turtles and a large black snake crossing. Apodaca stopped to help them cross the road.

“The glue that holds it all together”

The abundance of salamanders we encountered was both hopeful and surprising. Scientists often describe amphibians as highly sensitive animals. Their skin is permeable, so they’re more exposed to pollution in the soil and water. Many species also need a variety of habitats as they grow up, such as ponds and leaf litter, so they can be fussy about where they live. 

Yet here they were in a former epicenter of deforestation. How did they survive?

One explanation is that, on a geologic time scale, most of the severe logging and mining impacts were temporary, said John Maerz, a salamander expert at the University of Georgia. The forests were cleared in the 1900s, but now they’re growing back. “In the grand scheme of things, those were fairly ephemeral disturbances,” he said. 

Coal production in Appalachia has fallen by more than 60 percent in the last two decades. Clearcutting has waned, too, allowing forests in parts of Appalachia to grow back. 

Plus, some places were inaccessible to these extractive industries. Steep and rocky forests, including parts of Hickory Nut Gorge, were hard to cut, and that may have turned them into de facto wildlife refuges. 

But whatever the reason for it, the abundance of salamanders is absolutely essential to the health of Appalachian forests. Without salamanders, the natural balance of the ecosystem would come undone. “They’re the glue that holds it all together,” Apodaca told me. 

Although they’re poisonous, salamanders provide food for a wide array of predators including fish, snakes, and wild turkeys. They’re also predators themselves. Using their powerful tongues — which, at least among many Appalachian salamanders, shoot out like a harpoon — salamanders consume enormous quantities of insects. That keeps bug populations under control and, in a way, helps fight climate change. 

The mechanism is complicated, but here’s the gist: A lot of things that salamanders eat, including springtails and beetle larvae, chew up leaves on the forest floor. That chewing causes some of the carbon that’s locked away in those leaves to enter the air. By eating the leaf-chewers, salamanders limit the amount of carbon they release. 

Scientists have actually measured this. In one 2014 study, researchers estimated that a species of woodland salamander in Northern California could prevent more than 70 metric tons of carbon from being released across its range. That’s equivalent to taking 15 or so average passenger cars off the road. Salamanders are basically real-life climate heroes.

A bigger problem looms

The impacts of industrialization are far from over. Companies are still mining coal and harvesting timber in Appalachia, though they’re not as destructive. These industries also damage the environment long after they leave. In Central Appalachia, piles of coal waste from old mines continue to leach pollution into the water, Julie Shepherd-Powell, an anthropologist at Appalachian State University, told me. 

But today, the salamanders of Appalachia face different, bigger, and likely more enduring problems.

For one, climate change — which is driven by the same sort of extractive regime that destroyed so many Appalachian forests — is amplifying centuries of stress on Appalachian amphibians. Salamanders, especially the ones that don’t have lungs, breathe through their skin. To pull that off, they need to be moist, because gases, such as oxygen and carbon dioxide, more efficiently enter and leave their bodies when dissolved in water. Essentially, much of the lives of salamanders revolve around trying to stay damp. 

This, however, is becoming much harder to do, Maerz said. Scientists expect Appalachia to heat up and see more frequent and longer-lasting droughts, as well as more floods. When it’s dry, salamanders will hunker down beneath the leaf litter, trying not to lose water. That means they have less time to mate and eat.

While it’s counterintuitive, warming can also cause more frequent and severe flooding. That may harm life here, too, as floods fill rivers with sediment that buries habitat and makes it harder for some animals to breathe.

In 2010, Maerz and a handful of other researchers published a study on the impact of various climate scenarios on Appalachian salamanders. The results were frightening: “All model scenarios predict significant declines in species richness across the southern portion of the Appalachian Highlands with the loss of all current species from some areas,” the authors wrote. 

The good news is that the most dire predictions from that study have yet to come true. That’s probably because it didn’t fully account for the ingenious strategies that salamanders use to survive hot and dry spells. Some species, for example, wrap themselves up in a mucus cocoon to retain moisture. Salamanders can also essentially shut their bodies down during droughts to use up less energy and water. The remarkable ability of these animals to regenerate limbs may also help them hold onto moisture, research has shown.

Nonetheless, climate change is almost certainly starting to diminish salamander populations in Appalachia.

“Everything we know about them says that their ecology is going to be constrained by rising temperatures, decreasing precipitation, or increasing drought frequency,” Maerz told me. “Their abundance is going to go down.” 

All this warming is also made worse by another long-lasting impact: mountain development. In recent years there’s been a rise in construction, particularly of second homes, in salamander hotspots of North Carolina, several experts told me. That forest loss is more permanent, Maerz said. 

As trees disappear, more sunlight reaches the forest floor, where it can — along with climate change — warm up streams and dry out salamanders. The irony, of course, is that people are drawn to this region by its natural beauty and wildlife.

Several years ago, scientists including Maerz surveyed streams in parts of North Carolina and Tennessee, where forest cover had fallen from 79 percent in 1973 to 70 percent in 2012. That may not sound like much, but it caused a steep drop in the number of blackbelly salamanders that the researchers could detect. (It’s not clear what role development played in the 9 percent loss of forest cover.)

Forests have continued to fall in more recent years. In the last decade, developed areas in western North Carolina, which includes homes and golf courses, have increased by about 3 percent, according to Ryan Kirk, a geography professor at Elon University, who analyzed government land data for me. (The total amount of forest hardly changed in that period, likely because forest regrowth offset deforestation, Kirk said).

“Every property owner has the right to clear a little space for themselves by these beautiful streams,” said Kristen Cecala, an ecologist at the University of the South who was involved in the survey of blackbelly salamanders. “But every time we do that, we open up the canopy. And that has negative effects for the salamander populations that live there.”

Recognizing Appalachia as the gem it is

Appalachia is not alone in its environmental woes. The Amazon rainforest is still being hacked down on an enormous scale. Coral reefs are turning white and dying as ocean temperatures soar. In the West, wildfires are burning up the world’s largest trees. 

The difference is that these ecosystems are iconic and beloved. And that tends to translate to real protections. Scores of environmental groups — funded by big businesses and overseas philanthropists — are solely dedicated to keeping these places alive. 

Appalachia is not there yet. The region is still bogged down by false narratives and harmful stereotypes that overshadow what makes these mountains so unique: biodiversity and a rich cultural history that’s rooted in a sustainable land ethic.  

Salamanders are a critical piece of that. 

“They’re part of our natural heritage,” Cecala said, echoing a sentiment I heard over and over while reporting this story. “This is something that we should really be proud of. They are this hidden thing that we have — and they’re amazing.” 

On my last morning in North Carolina, I visited a creek about 30 minutes south of Asheville to see what I think are the most amazing salamanders of all: hellbenders. 

Apodaca and I donned boots, grabbed nets, and stepped into the water. It was ice-cold and clear. As we walked upstream, he put his hand under large flat rocks and felt around. 

Reaching two feet or longer, hellbenders — also known as snot otters or devil dogs — are the largest amphibians in North America. They’re also some of the strangest. Like the shar-peis of the salamander world, they’ve got wrinkly brown skin, which helps them breathe underwater. They also have tiny eyes, cute toes, and a large paddle-like tail. And rocks are their life. Come breeding season, male hellbenders, known as “den masters,” find and defend a particular rock furiously, which they use to lure in females.

The challenge that morning was that hellbenders look exactly like rocks. Like exactly. Having never seen one, I was useless. I also didn’t love the idea of poking around dark crevices underwater when the best-case scenario was finding something big and slimy. 

Apodaca caught some crawdads and fish. Then, in a quiet section of creek where the water was nearly placid, he froze and pointed. I followed his finger and saw nothing. A few seconds later, something I had registered as a rock started to move. 

Using his net, Apodaca pulled the animal out of the water. It was a foot and a half long and looked like a wet muppet. It had a huge mouth and glistening, cartoonish eyes. 

There’s arguably no better example of the wonder in Appalachia than hellbenders. They’re basically stones come to life — real spirits of the river, that seem like they belong in a Miyazaki film.

They’re also a reminder of how easily we can lose this wonder. Eastern hellbenders, which have been on Earth for more than 150 million years, are declining everywhere, Apodaca said. Farming and deforestation, coupled with severe floods, are filling streams with sediment, which covers up the nooks and crannies they live in. This creek is one of the country’s last hellbender strongholds. 

In the Appalachian Mountains, and really, across the world, so much environmental harm is rooted in a disconnect with the land. It’s rooted in a failure by countries and companies to see the value of nature and to respect the people who depend on it. The future of natural treasures like this depend on changing that, on seeing Appalachia as people here have long seen it: a one-of-a-kind bastion of life.