Where to find wild axolotls

That means scientists can breed them throughout the course of the year. Axolotls may also offer insight to the genetic controls that regulate the switch in life for processes like puberty. With the race against the clock growing ever pressing, the axolotl conservation efforts ramped up in the early s with a proposed captive breeding and species reintroduction project.

Thus, the team developed an action plan in to raise the profile of the axolotl in the local community through education programs, workshops, and public meetings. They focused on integrating the axolotl into the tourism in the community. Local businesses like La Casita del Axolotl breed axolotls for sale and conduct tours with their guests and clients. The local community was always essential for the axolotl conservation efforts. The difficult method of collecting axolotls—searching for subtle bubbles and casting the net just right—that is needed for censuses is hard to teach, but it is a skill that is passed down through generations of local fishermen.

Locals distrust scientists, who have historically exploited the community for data in the past without coming back or paying them sufficiently. Zambrano approached the relationship differently. He knew the community had all the knowledge he needed, so he offered his data collecting skills and credibility as a way for them to have their voices heard—and to help their livelihoods. These efforts have scaled up in recent years as Zambrano involves local farmers in the process.

The productive and sustainable agricultural system does not use chemical pesticides—they have even experimented with grinding up invasive tilapia for fertilizer—and creates a semi-permeable barrier to provide refuge for the axolotl with clean, filtered water.

It may not be enough. Zambrano is hopeful. He has seen a steady increase in interest in the axolotl, which he hopes to leverage into local government action. The first step, he says, is to save Xochimilco.

Future of Conservation A Smithsonian magazine special report. Few realize that the lovable, cotton-candy-pink amphibian is on the edge of extinction. The axolotl is different. Xochimilco Lake is the last refuge of the Mexican axolotl, a remarkable creature whose regenerative power is no match against urbanization and pollution.

Axolotls are richly represented in captivity. These two, at the Vancouver Aquarium, are leucistic, meaning they have less pigmentation than normal. Scientists can force axolotls in the lab to metamorphose by injecting them with thyroid hormones , but axolotl metamorphosis rarely occurs in the wild. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources considers axolotls critically endangered and their population declining.

Surveys in and found that the population density had dropped from about 6, individuals per square kilometer to individuals per square kilometer. A more recent survey in found about 35 individuals per square kilometer. Pollution has been particularly detrimental to the species. Poor waste regulations and increasing tourism in Mexico City mean that trash, plastics, heavy metals and high levels of ammonia spilled from waste-treatment plants clog the canals where the salamanders live.

A substantial captive population exists in research labs around the world, accounting for several thousand individuals. But these salamanders stem from 33 individuals shipped to Paris from Xochimilco, Mexico, so the population is highly inbred. Among the axolotl's trademark talents is its ability to regrow almost any body part — feet, legs, arms, tails, even bits of the heart and brain.

And they don't stop with regeneration of their own body parts. All sorts of organs, including eyes, can be transplanted between axolotls without rejection by the recipient body's immune system. In , researchers showed that they could even transplant the head of one axolotl to another axolotl, and it functioned normally. The combination of these abilities make axolotls attractive model organisms for scientists.

In , researchers discovered another oddity about axolotls: Their genome is enormous. At about 32 billion pairs of DNA nucleotides, the axolotl genome dwarfs the human genome, which is about 10 times smaller, and ranks as the largest animal genome sequenced from beginning to end so far.

Researchers are wading through the genome to uncover the secrets behind the axolotl's regenerative abilities. A few months later, I take him up on the offer and hop on a plane. The project is in the purview of Alejandra Ramos, a postdoc in his lab. She takes me there on my first evening in Mexico by hailing a cab and directing the driver from the back seat. An elderly security guard lets us in.

This is the Cantera Oriente, an abandoned rock quarry. After mining ceased here, groundwater springs bubbled up from underneath, creating four small lakes in a bowl surrounded by unnaturally steep cliffs. The university now uses it as an ecological research site. Recently, these lakes have also hosted ten axolotls implanted with radio trackers.

For an animal so often studied, our basic ecological understanding of axolotls in the wild is fragmented and incomplete.

Ramos is trying to understand how axolotls spend their time. She advertised online for some two dozen volunteers to track the salamanders day and night, mostly attracting biology and veterinary students from the university.

Once unloved, axolotls have become the toast of the town. One of the volunteers showed me her own axolotl illustrations. Another shared a smartphone picture of a new axolotl mural in Reforma, an august neighborhood at the heart of the city. As the sun sets, Ramos heads home.

Volunteers Andres, Esmeralda, and Karen come through the gate. We walk down a path to one of the lakes, push a boat in, and row around as the twilight deepens, brushing off spiders, listening to the beeps from a radio antenna as we try to maneuver the boat on top of each axolotl to record its position. As they work, the volunteers, delighted to be experiencing nature in the middle of a megacity, try to scare me with a ghost story.

They tell me the old security guard claims he sees a man here at night, a figure who stands behind the pine trees, ducks out, and hides again. But the only ghost we find is a faint blip on an unexpected frequency band. In January , the volunteers say, two radio-tagged axolotls were released for an earlier experiment. The female was never caught again.

Could this be her? When I ask Ramos about it later, she is skeptical. The radio transmitters die after only about 50 days. This blip is just signal interference. But the basic fact is true, that not every axolotl in the Cantera Oriente is accounted for. In a previous job, Ramos spent a year on a mountain in Baja California, working with California condors. Those giant raptors have been saved from extinction, but their survival relies on heavy human involvement. She wonders—worries—whether axolotls will reach the same point.

A vault of wild-ish axolotls in the Cantera Oriente would be a good insurance policy, a compromise. Better still would be never having to use it. Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens.

And through her cooking, his great-grandmother taught him about the axolotl—with its pleasing fishy flavor and cartilaginous crunch, served with local herbs and maize. You eat it head to toe, he says. In the s, a visiting European naturalist praised their flavor and wrote that you could buy them in nearby markets either alive or roasted. Now Mendez-Rosas is working with neighboring farmers to build an ecological refuge. Safeguarding the right habitat will take a fusion of traditional and scientific knowledge, he argues.

With a rake, he pulls out a clump of plants to illustrate his own expertise. Here are the little roly-poly crustaceans the axolotl eats, he says. That kind of collaboration may be long overdue.