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The documented Indiana range, to the present
Absent, on the record: The hellbender's presence is stated absent. Indiana's hellbender — North America's largest salamander, up to two and a half feet, state-endangered — belongs to the rocky, swift tributaries of the Ohio. The Indiana Herp Atlas, following Minton's Amphibians and Reptiles of Indiana (2001), gives the historic Indiana records as the Whitewater River from Franklin County south, the Wabash from Vigo County south, the Ohio River and its larger rocky tributaries — every one of them in the southern half of the state, in Ohio River drainage. The Maumee, St. Joseph, and St. Marys appear nowhere in the species' Indiana record.
What remains of it: The atlas's verdict on the southern population is grim enough to print here as the contrast: hellbenders "have disappeared from most of their former range" in Indiana and are now known only from portions of the Blue River and its tributaries, where few nests and no juveniles have ever been found. The Nature Conservancy's Indiana account lists the historic waters — Fourteen Mile Creek, the Little Blue, Whitewater, Silver Creek, Indian Creek, the Ohio, the Wabash — and the same single survivor. A Fort Wayne reader meeting the hellbender in print should know it for what it is in this record: an animal of the other end of Indiana, never documented in the three rivers, and included in this section so that its absence is a finding rather than an oversight.
Sources:
- Indiana Herp Atlas, "Hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis)" (historic and current Indiana distribution), inherpatlas.org.
- The Nature Conservancy, "Conserving Hellbender Salamanders in Indiana," nature.org; Indiana DNR, "Rare Salamanders" (the Ohio and Wabash tributary range), in.gov.