As my chief object in collecting the hellbenders was to obtain eggs fcr embryological work (my hope being that the animals would spawn in captivity) and as I had at first no idea as to when the spawning season occurred, I started in pursuit of the creatures about the first of February, tramping many weary miles through three feet of snow and chopping numerous holes through the thick ice that covered French Creek in which the hellbenders abound. Hand-lines, night-lines and traps were tried again and again, but, though several specimens of Necturus were caught, not a single Cryptobranchus was obtained until the twenty-eighth of March, after the ice and snow had all disappeared and several days of warm weather had slightly warmed the water. Fishermen, generally, stated that 'alligators' could not be caught until the ice had melted and the water had had time to warm slightly.
Although the first specimens were caught during the last days of March, it was not until nearly a month later that they could be obtained in any numbers, and it was during May that they were most abundant. About June 7, desiring to obtain a few more specimens, I applied to the boys from whom I had been buying them, but, after fishing for a week or more, they told me that the 'alligators' had stopped biting, and I was unable to obtain the additional specimens that I wanted. "Whether they usually cease taking food at this time I am unable to say, but Mr. Chas. H. Townsend, of the New York Aquarium, says[1] that they were caught by him in August, on hooks baited with pieces of meat or fish heads. Most of the specimens I obtained were caught in traps that had been set for fish, though many were caught with hook and line, the disadvantage in the latter method being that the hook was often caught so far down in the digestive tract that it could not be extracted without seriously injuring the animal.
The color of all the hellbenders, when first caught, was a more or less uniform dirty black or greenish-brown with numerous irregular dark spots on the dorsal side. Fishermen were occasionally heard to speak of 'red alligators' but I never saw a hellbender that could, in truth, be called red, though after they had been in captivity for a couple of months many of them changed color very perceptibly, becoming a more decided brown, sometimes with a decided greenish tinge and sometimes with the dark spots, mentioned above, very pronounced. It is possible that this change in color, in a state of nature, may be very much more marked and that when the breeding season arrives it may become an actual red, and serve as a sexual character. Judging from analogy, it would be supposed that these more brilliantly colored individuals would be males, but such was not the case. Of the specimens that I had under observation, nearly all were females; if this were true in a state of nature, it might be possible
- ↑ American Naturalist, February, 1882.
