Girl, 10, finds rare Mexican axolotl under Welsh bridge
bbc.com197 points by codezero 11 hours ago
197 points by codezero 11 hours ago
Indeed, most axolotls in Wales are Welsh axolotls.
But I do wonder how many do live in Wales. If it’s not just an abandoned pet that would be really interesting.
From the article it doesn't appear they've ever been found alive in the wild anywhere but their natural habitat. This was likely a remarkable chance happening where an owner released one and she found it within close succession or else it likely would have died very quickly.
If there is a wild population, that would be an even more amazing story.
I did think it was strange they didn't spell that out though. Maybe they thought 'Mexican' makes it clear, but it reads too easily like a species name.
It is absolutely an abandoned pet. They cannot survive outside the tropics. Hell, they can't even survive outside the 2 lakes in Mexico City that they're hyperadapted to
There are less than 1,000 of them in the wild. Trust me if it was possible to establish a population somewhere else outside of captivity, scientists and conservationists would already be on it
> It is absolutely an abandoned pet.
That. Or the family fabricated the story for online fame.
Not saying that i have any evidence either way. Fundamentaly it is an unverifiable feel-good story with great online “viral” potential. It might be a very lucky axolotl who got abandoned, found and re-captured in the short window it could survive in the wild. It can also be a viral content strategy capturing eyeballs. In my, admitedly very jaded, guestimate I would give the two options about equal chances.
Not an axolotl, but mud puppies live as far north as Canada and have external gills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_mudpuppy
Olm in the Balkans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olm picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:P_anguinus-head1.jpg
Very cool but yes very much not an axolotl.
An axolotl is a salamander that has evolved neoteny (imagine a frog staying as a tadpole its whole life). It's also specifically adapted to a specific lake system in Mexico City. If it is kept in water under 57°F (14°C) it will die in a few days. They are also extremely sensitive to changes in the water quality or chemistry. It's not clear that this one will even survive after being rescued
I’m surprised no one is bringing up the possibility that this is just a salamander in its axolotl looking stage of life.
Examples in the wild are - bar the possibility of an albino example - all dark skinned. The pink/light skinned ones are the results of mutations and ultimately selective breeding in the pet population.
So is it likely this one merely escaped? I find it hard to believe someone who would own one of these would not be an enthusiast, and that enthusiasts wouldn't find another owner for a critically endangered species rather than merely drop it under a local bridge.
No it is extremely unlikely this is an "escape". This would be lucky to survive for a week in Europe. Almost certainly what happened is someone bought one and then realized they are too complicated to take care of and decided to dump it in a spot they thought looked pretty
Also there are 1,000 of these in the wild but there are over a million of them in captivity. You can get a typical morph for about $50.
It's this, for sure. An axolotl is not going to live in the wild. I own a home near a public pond. There are pretty much always fancy goldfish swimming in it during the time of the year that everyone moves out. People just decide not to keep their fish.
Sooo, if they are/were popular as pets, how come there's less than 1000 left worldwide? Those two facts don't reconcile for me.
1000 wild ones. There's much more in captivity than in the wild.
They evolved to be quite dependent on the unique agricultural islands in the Valley of Mexico called Chinampas. These were drained by the colonizers. Which is why Mexico City is now facing a severe water crisis and also why these creatures are endangered
Also why the whole region has so many sinkhole and similar drainage problems - it's literally built on a lake.
Yup. A lake that used to fuel the single most productive agricultural system humans have ever practiced. It's sad but there is a strong indigenous movement to bring them back. The axolotl actually became a major symbol of indigenous resistance because of this movement
> the single most productive agricultural system humans have ever practiced
This is simply not true. The highiest maize yield per hectare I can find anywhere online for chinampas is less than half the 13.5 metric tons per hectare that farmers get in Iowa. The more reputable numbers are less than 1/4 of that. It's probably true that they were among the most productive pre-modern agricultural plots which is a great achievement, but there's no need to make things up.
I'm not being hyperbolic.
They produce a lot more than just corn. Not only can they be farmed for hundreds of years without break, but they can be harvested 4 to 7 times per year. They are 13 times as productive per unit of area as conventional dry-land farming.
> In Xochimilco, roughly 750 hectares of active chinampas produce around 80 tons of vegetables daily. This translates to a massive, continuous, year-round output of over 38,000 tons per year across the entire area
So that translates to 50.7 metric tons per hectre.
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> the most productive pre-modern agricultural plots which is a great achievement, but there's no need to make things up
Post-industrial agriculture is not actually more productive per area. It's just more productive per input labor.
> Agricultural yields within the most densely populated and productive preindustrial land-use systems compared well with modern yields and were sustained in some regions for centuries to millennia, even though they also tended to require extreme inputs of labor and other socially unsustainable hardships
How much fertilizer does the Iowan farmer need to add to their field to achieve that? How many years can they maintain that yield without eroding the soil?
How it was (a great interactive 3d reconstruction)
This is awesome, thanks for sharing.
Andrew Wilson, who works with the United Nations World Food Program, also made an in-depth minidoc on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86gyW0vUmVs
Wow this is amazing. Thank you!
Thanks to the author and HN - it was posted here sometime ago, and being that impressive it naturally stuck in my memory like i'm sure now it will in yours :)
Axolotls have also been used for over 200 years for medical research related to regenerative biology. They’re unique among vertebrates in that they can regenerate nearly every part of their body, even parts of their brain. https://orip.nih.gov/about-orip/research-highlights/amazing-...
Contrary to the report, they are actually not difficult to keep as pets - they are just highly sensitive to pollutants in the water.
The unfortunate case for the wild population, is that they naturally inhabit a location which today has one of the highest human population densities in the world, and hence massive pressure on water resources. We could probably quite easily re-establish a breeding population in remote areas in Europe but would constitute an invasive species and hence wouldn't happen.
As a species, they are not endangered due to their very large populations now in the pet trade (though these then get inbred, become domesticated etc).
I believe all captive ones are cross-bred, so are distinct from the native species
"in the wild" might be doing a lot of heavy lifting, or it may be based on subspecies or similar.
I don't really expect to find endangered species at the local pet store.
I have three axolotl's in the next room, there are no subspecies to my knowledge, except maybe for some cross breeding with Salamanders in the US.
They are common in scientific research as they have amazing regenerative abilities; they will often mistakenly bite each other's legs off as juveniles (they are not the smartest creatures) and then grow them back in a few weeks, good as new. They made it into the exotic pet trade and now they are quite common in captivity, but now critically endangered in the wild. There are attempts to breed and repopulate them, with some limited success.
Another interesting thing, in many countries and states it is legal to keep an axolotl and illegal to keep a Salamander.
They are actually fairly easy to keep in my experience, with two caveats. 1) you need to be able to keep the water below 24 Deg C, this means spending some money on chillers even in sub-tropical countries. 2) If you have a pair in the same tank (regardless of sexing) you need to be prepared to cull the eggs! (freeze them) Prices here went from ~$50NZ each down to around $10-15 each due to the Minecraft craze.
my understanding is that thr light skinned / pink variants are the results of mutation and selective breeding - and obviously racism, light skinned being considered more cute - in the pet population and almost all examples in the wild are dark skinned.
Racism? Come on. A camouflaged pet you can't see in the tank isn't as fun as one where you can see all the crazy physical structures.
Why are salamanders illegal?
Because they burst into flame! 90% of wizard dwelling fires are caused by salamanders!
(in reality probably the law banning them as pets to protect them didn't include axolotls because the legislature didn't know they existed)
They're either an invasive species, and therefore should not be introduced to the area (and you know that many pets will be introduced once the novelty wears off). Or they're native to the area, and should be left alone because they're endangered or otherwise threatened.
Those are just two reasons, but I'd bet they cover a lot of cases.
Often Axolotls have been "grandfathered" into the legal exotic pet trade, and salamanders have not and they tend to be considered separate species, even though biologically it's a very blurry line. Also, it often happens in areas where there is a local wild salamander population that is being protected from poaching.
You likely don't have wild axolotls nearby so if a pet escapes it'll just die and not affect the ecosystem. OTOH, an escaped salamander might thrive and displace wild salamanders and disrupt the ecosystem. Or carry a disease, or ...
most places ban exotic pets that are able to survive in the local climate to prevent invasive species from outcompeting the local feral cat population.
It's a similar story for Venus fly trap plants. It has a tiny habitat so it's exotic. They're easy to breed so it's cheap to start selling them. But their limited habitat is being destroyed, so they are endangered and also on the clearance rack at the garden store.
Why not. We found plenty of endagered species at zoos. They are endangered not only as a function of the number of species, but due to their vanishing environments.
It's a very strange definition. Would you consider domestic chickens "endangered"? Clearly if there are many kept in captivity and bred, there's little chance of them becoming extinct even if there are nearly none in the wild.
the pet ones are almostly entirely captive bred so they are pretty distinct by now
Fun fact: Axolotl have the largest animal genome ever sequenced with ~32b base pairs, 10x more than humans.
It amazes me she chanced upon it at the right time and even knew exactly what it was.
Axolotl's have become a global icon. First as an anti-colonial protest symbol for indigenous peoples. But now it's even a creature in Minecraft
Edit: oh the article says as much
> Axolotls as pets have seen a surge in popularity in recent years after they were introduced to video games such as Minecraft and Roblox.
Also, the child seems quite familiar with the wildlife
> She said Evie was "always finding things" like newts and bugs, but said the axolotl discovery was a surprise.
What's even funnier is the mother's reaction who apparently didn't believe axolotl's were real
> "I've been telling Evie all this time that those creatures she watches on YouTube, they're not real.
Yeah, I didn't want to spoil the article with my comment, it was a good read, but it did immediately make sense why they were so popular now. I've met multiple people in passing who own Axolotl. I used to think I was super special that I met a guy who owned one, and I assumed it was because he was a famous neuroscientist, and had some special permission, but now they're relatively common as pets (to a degree).
> Experts have warned axolotls should never be bought on impulse as they can "very challenging" to look after.
> This is because they have the same environmental, dietary and behavioural needs in captivity as they do in the wild.
I thought this was just odd. Don’t most animals that aren’t heavily domesticated like that? I mean that’s true of most all pet fish, for example.
Unfortunately, the whole Minecraft thing caused a lot of people to buy them with little understanding of proper care, so I suspect there's some "that's cool but please don't rush in unprepared" in the hard to keep message. There are also some misconceptions around water quality requirements, they really don't like chemical pollutants, but I have no issues with local municipal water, other areas could have issues and require RO water, etc. but there are plenty of tropical fish keepers in this same situation.
And then there's the water temp thing, that caught me off-guard and I was using frozen water bottles for a few weeks until my chiller arrived, if the tank had been located in a different part of the house it might have been required.
From another comment here: "you need to be able to keep the water below 24 Deg C, this means spending some money on chillers even in sub-tropical countries"
I think people anticipate needing heaters for certain types of fish, but I'd never have expected to buy a cooling unit for aquatic life.
Yeah, adding in a chiller makes things way more complicated than just adding a resistive heater. A decent looking chiller for an aquarium is ~$1,000, plus you need temp sensors and control wiring to maintain the setpoint properly, and then you need to pray the electricity doesn’t go out. A 1/3rd HP chiller draws around 1kW including the circ pump
An aquarium backup battery for a simple pump is like $50 for something that'll last a few hours of outage, but for a chiller with that kind of draw, it's a bit more expensive.
They're also a symbol for asexuality, or at least they were where I grew up.
First time I learnt about it was while reading The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. Fantastic book.
> I've been telling Evie all this time that those creatures she watches on YouTube, they're not real.
This is a really strange side comment, lol. I guess the mom doesn’t believe in some animals?
To be fair, many people think Narwhals are a mythical creature. For good reason imo. They're fantastic
Why not leave it in the wild? Now the poor thing has to stare at the inside of a bucket for the rest of its life.
Not its natural habitat - it would probably die in winter
Axolotls are somewhat popular as pets so I’m thinking someone got rid of theirs by tossing it in the river and the girl just happened to find it afterwards.
Far more plausible explanation than “found in the wild 9000km and an ocean away from its place of origin”
They freeze and thaw like Iguanas do in Florida. They can’t survive prolonged cold temperatures but when it does get to 15c they stop moving.
I wonder if that's why she had caught it so easily, not many people are visiting the UK for it's sunny climate.
The UK is sometimes warmer in winter than other european countries further south because of the gulf stream.
People are telling you it would die in the winter but the truth is it would die in a week. This pet was surely abandoned in the past 48 hours and that's why this is so rare.
They are hyper adapted to the water cycles, nutrient profile, and pH levels of the Xochimilco lake system in Mexico city and were taken care of by indigenous people for thousands of years. They have never survived anywhere outside of these lakes
They used to live in some others areas too. I once visited some places in the sierras close to Queretaro and while we were walking along the river a local guide told me he hasn't seen one in a decade but he used to see them regularly when he was a teenager.
Having said that there are surely a lot of factors that would make its survival impossible in wales given how hard it is for them to survive in their original ecosystems.
He may have been referring to the very closely related Ambystoma velasci
The historic range of the axolotl was indeed a bit wider than the current lakes beneath Mexico City, but not that much wider
Yes there were more than one specy, somewhere between 15 and 20. I don't know tge names of them all and the one most emblematic of xochimilco may very well be limited to this area but that doesn't mean the other species do not count, especially if they were all called axolotl by the indigenous population.
I see. Yeah there are 32 species in the same family and they almost all look like an axolotl before they undergo metamorphosis. The unique thing about axolotls is they are the only salamander species in the world that doesn't undergo metamorphosis (this is called neoteny). It'd be like if a frog just stayed as a tadpole its whole life.
1. The article already mentions the parents of the girl who caught it are looking into how to best keep an axolotl and a bigger tank has already arrived.
2. Axolotls can't survive in a Welsh climate. This creature will live much longer as a pet than it would in the wild.
It's against the law for it to be in the wild. And the temperature range in which it can survive is quite narrow, it would probably die sometime this year if left alone.
As mentioned in the article, this was almost certainly someone's pet and dumped in the river when they couldn't take care of it anymore. Axolotls are endemic to Mexico.
I suspect someone dumped their pet. Considering its from Mexico I also suspect it prefers a warmer water/climate?
Even if you are an endangered species, humans wont leave you alone.
The BBC paywall for US users is really a bummer
Why did she name him Dippy and not a proper Welsh name like "Cadwaladr" or "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch?"
I think her family was visiting Wales, rather than being natives :)
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Wales is a lot smaller than the continental United States. What do you expect them to say? "Cardiff is part of Wales, unceded territory of the Welsh"? That would be entirely performative. If you feel strongly about this topic, you ought to demand more meaningful steps, such as the use of Welsh language place names.
I just think they should acknowledge the native people whose land it is. It’s not performative unless you’re a MAGA fascist. It’s just considerate.
What form would such an acknowledgement take?
"We inhabitants of Dry Land must acknowledge that we all descended from these superior beings of Water Worlds. All the salt water in our veins is a debt and homage to the Water Beings from whom we stole it. We Dry Landers will forever devote ourselves to lifting up on a pedestal, these Water Beings, as long as that pedestal is submerged deep underwater. We solemnly pledge and promise the payment of reparations, in the form of Sea Monkeys for breakfast."
well good thing she was 10
Imagine if it were the other way around:
Mexican axolotl, 10, finds rare Girl under Welsh bridge.
That would make her description in the article as a "young female" a little more fitting, at least.
And dont you pronounce that 'x' as 'ks'! It's pronounced as 'sh'! Just like in 'xocolatl'.
I have a feeling you're fighting a losing battle here
Prenounciation and correcting other's spelling is always a losing battle, probably for everyone involved.
That one is ancient history. My 6yo is currently fighting her friends and their parents alike to make them realize and learn that there is an "L" at the end - it's "axolotl", not "axolot".
It's technically not just “an L” if we're trying to avoid Anglicizing the pronunciation, right? The “tl” cluster is its own affricate with a lateral fricative as its tail, or am I misremembering?
Every scientific battle is worth fighting for!
Scientific study of languages generally admits that language drift eventually.
What is scientific about this pronunciation? Axolotl is not the scientfic name (its Ambystoma mexicanum), and usually the goal with pronouncing scientific names is for the listener to be able to spell the name after hearing it (at least for botany, which is what I am familiar with).
In Spanish, it's "ajolote".
In the Spanish of the 1490s and early 1500s, there was a "SH" sound, spelled with X, the same way there is today in other Iberian languages like Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, or Basque. They got to Mexico and wrote many indigenous words with "SH" sounds (like "Mexico" and "axolotl") with X. Shortly after this, the pronunciation shifted to the modern Spanish J sound (which in much of the Spanish speaking world is like the CH in loch, but in some countries is like an H sound).
I am Spanish myself and didn't know about this fact until recently. It explains many "old-fashioned" spellings like México, Pedro Ximenez, or Don Quixote (nowadays usually written as Quijote, but you will find the old spelling in other languages).
For those who are curious enough, this article explains the evolution of the Spanish sibilants and why our languages uses J and Z in a very different way from pretty much any other language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...
My favorite example: It also explains why "sherry" wine comes from "Jerez" ... Because it used to be Xerez at the time that most European languages learned the name.
Was a bit disappointed that, in the Spanish dub of X-Men, it isn't pronounced "Profesor Javier".
Well, actually I suppose the hardest part is to pronounce the other consonant hispanicized as -tl at the end (a soft lisp)
[ɬ] voiceless alveolar lateral fricative [0]
in a sufficient fluent manner (except you happen to speak e.g. Welsh, there the sound is written as ll so by happenstance the "axolotl" found in Wales can be pronounced fluently by the Welsh) otherwise you are saying it half correct which is arguably worse.
So let the nahuatl speaking people have a laugh at your expense for pronouncing it the germanic way or if you want to go unnoticed do it the evolved spanish romanic way, a good middle ground I guess.
Anyway I think it is generally a lot fun to hear words pronounced "wrong" by foreigners or having trouble hearing/pronouncing it "right" respectively heavy accents are hilarious icebreakers (:
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_...
You're close.
The Welsh or Icelandic "ll" is not quite the same. That's a "voiceless lateral fricative", lacking the alveolar break that earned it the "t" in "tl" for the Latinized spelling. It's much closer than most languages get, but it is a different sound.
The Nahuatl consonant is a "voiceless alveolar lateral affricate". It is a single constant represented with [tɬ] or, more correctly, with a tie bar between those two glyphs: [t͡ɬ].
Well most non nahuatl speaking mexicans simply call them by the spanish traduction, ajolote.
That's nice for them, but how will I prove my intellectual superiority if I don't have a historically accurate pronunciation?
If you want it to be pronounced "sh", just write it "sh".
They wanted it to be pronounced 'x', so they wrote it 'x': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahuatl_orthography
They can spell/pronounce things differently than we do and it's all cool either way. It's very common for animals to have different spellings, pronunciations, or even completely different names between languages. If you add time and regional axes, the same variances can be true even when keeping with the same language!
I'm just explaining why it's written 'x' and pronounced [ʃ]. If it pleases people to knowingly mispronounce Nahuatl loan words, they can do so, but it seems rather silly given that [ʃ] is also in the phonemic inventory of English. What next? Are you going say 'fowks pass' for faux pas?
Where I disagree is the premise it's supposed to be mispronunciation to say/spell a word differently than where it came from, doubly so when we change the spellings/pronunciations of our own words!
I think the disconnect here is that I actually wasn't aware that 'axolotl' existed as an established word in English. If you're looking at it just as a Nahuatl word written using Nahuatl orthographic conventions, then it's weird for someone to suggest that it should be written with a 'sh' because that's how it's pronounced.
All good, I just don't think it's so weird :).
What I meant is that it would be weird for an English speaker to have views on how Nahuatl words should be written using Nahuatl orthography, since different languages obviously have different orthographic conventions and associate different symbols with different sounds.
