South of Raleigh, where Johnston County’s subdivisions creep into former farmland, Swift Creek looks like an ordinary stream — slow, brown-green, unremarkable. But it is remarkable in one way: It is home to the Neuse River waterdog, a fully aquatic salamander found nowhere else on Earth beyond a narrow stretch of North Carolina’s Neuse and Tar River basins.
The Neuse River waterdog (Necturus lewisi) grows up to a foot long and sports a reddish-brown body dappled with blue-black spots, but its most striking feature is a pair of feathery, blood-red external gills that flutter like a set of underwater feather boas.
The waterdogs were listed as federally threatened in 2021. Living for decades, some of these waterdogs are older than the subdivisions threatening their existence…