BOONE, North Carolina — On the whooshing Watauga River, excavators claw at the remains of Shulls Mill Dam, pulling concrete apart piece by piece and gradually opening a waterway kept in check for nearly two centuries.
Removal of this privately owned hydropower dam in western North Carolina will be a boon for rafters, kayakers and tubers by allowing the river to flow freely for nearly 80 miles. But maybe the biggest beneficiary will be a strange, ancient creature known as the eastern hellbender salamander.
Sometimes called a “snot otter” or “Allegheny alligator,” it’s North America’s largest salamander and can reach 2 feet in length. But the salamander’s range in places such as southern Appalachia has shrunk and its numbers are down 70 percent over the past 50 years.
“What’s so important about the hellbender is they need special habitat — clear, clean, cold, heavily oxygenated water,” said Andy Hill, a Watauga riverkeeper with MountainTrue, which teamed up with American Rivers to remove the dam in July. “The hellbender is kind of a keystone species for a mountain stream ecosystem, and removal of this dam will create new habitat.”