This year the St. Louis Zoo hosted the 7th Hellbender Symposium, and I was asked to design the T-shirt. It was a fun job and my first design to be printed on a shirt. Ozark hellbenders are a threatended species of endangered giant salamander found only in Missouri, and the St. Louis Zoo has worked very hard to protect them. This is the first place to successfully breed hellbenders in captivity, which is an enormous breakthrough for insuring the survival of the species.
To celebrate the breeding program, I drew a pair of mating hellbenders with a clutch of eggs and a plume of salamander sperm (milt), to go on the back of the shirt. The front of the shirt says "Got Milt?" The shirts were a big hit and I had lots of people tell me they really liked them.
Below is a link to a short documentary about the ozark hellbenders for anyone who is interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8iamcw9gmQ
Below is a link to a short documentary about the ozark hellbenders for anyone who is interested:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8iamcw9gmQ
I bought this shirt at the AAZK conference a few years back and I love it! Always fun to explain it to people. Thanks for making this blog post, it helps with the explanation!
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