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
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.
We used to keep similar axolotls as pets. I believe the abandoned pet thing - they are fun for a while but then you wonder what to do with them. We donated ours and the tank to a school. They'd probably survive a while in the wild in the summer but I'm not sure they'd like winter much.
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.
> I find it hard to believe someone who would own one of these would not be an enthusiast
You underestimate how many people lack impulse control or consideration over their choices, and their lack of understanding of consequences when buying a living organism.
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
There aren’t many baby salamanders that size, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_giant_salamander#Breed... says “external gills remain until a length of about 20 cm (8 in) at an age of 3 years”, so it could be. I wouldn’t know whether these look similar, though.
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 Had Teeth’: A 3-Year-Old Discovers Ancient Treasure in Israel
While on a hike with her family, a child stumbled across a 3,800-year-old Egyptian amulet. It will go on display in an upcoming exhibition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/world/middleeast/child-an...
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
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
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 :)
> 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.
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.
---
> 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
That article you linked doesn't mention Xochimilco at all so I have no clue what you're quoting. I can't find a single source for your 80 tons claim (other than some blog post that cites another blog post), which if true and I suspect it isn't is 20 tons less per hectare than many conventional vegetables like cabbage and tomatoes. Other sources I found cite a number that's less than half of what you're claiming. Do you have a real source that isn't a blog post?
>Post-industrial agriculture is not actually more productive per area. It's just more productive per input labor.
This is alarmingly false. As I pointed out many conventional vegetables yield 100 tons per hectare today. Moreover yes they are more productive per unit of labor. The Mexica and their contemporary polities around Lake Texcoco were miserable slave societies that used armies of captured war salves (tlacotin) to perform much of the work. They also used unpaid corvee labor through the coatequitl system, and serfs known as mayeques. So honestly its quite the social advancement that we don't have to press people into agricultural labor at spear point anymore.
> Agricultural yields within the most densely populated and productive preindustrial land-use systems compared well with modern yields
The references for this quote are about South East Asian rice agriculture, which today is still done more or less done the way it was in premodern times. This quote doesn't support your argument and is at best deceptive.
I was addressing two separate points you made. I thought the "---" would make that clear.
> This is alarmingly false.
I'm sorry but I can't take your comment more seriously than a paper published in a respected journal that has been cited 1,099 times. It provides 4 sources to back up the claim I posted.
In scholarship on land use history this is pretty well accepted.
---
As for the specific chinampas yields, such high yields shouldn't be surprising when you have 4-7 harvest per year and require no periods of being fallow.
The UN's FAO provides more specific breakdowns on yields on page 22 of their report
> It is clear that the yield per crop varies depending on the species and
variety sown. However, in the case of the chinampas, yields are
between 10 to 15 tonnes/hectare. An average of 12.5 tons/ha
That's not 80 tons per hectare as you stated.
> I'm sorry but I can't take your comment more seriously than a paper published in a respected journal that has been cited 1,099 times
You took the quote out of context, it's about rice agriculture in South East Asia, not Xochimilco. I check the citations and you obviously didn’t.
You are blatantly making things up here and trying to back your bullshit claims with papers that you are misrepresenting.
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?
Ammonia can be generated through electrolysis as feed-stock for Haber-Bosch to get nitrogen, so literally forever. The reason we use petroleum is because it's currently cheaper than solar PV electrolysis.
Sure, but it would take some time to transition to ramp up production to the scale required by world-scale agriculture. We're using petroleum for this because it was cheap & easy. Not saying we can't transition, but it will take time.
Right, but it's possible with existing tech and there's no scenario where oil disappears all at once. Its a highly geographically distributed resource.
Who cares? Fertilizer is nitrogen that literally comes out of the air. Erosion is vastly overstated by permaculture enthusiasts and can be mitigated vy changes to tillage and irrigation. Erosion in the Midwest clocks in at about 0.04 mm per year, but there's plenty of new soil deposition around the Mississippi. It's a manageable issue.
Extremely wrong how? There's a great an well sourced section in Vaclav Smil's How to Feed the World about this very topic. I also cited a specific erosion figure. But I guess that doesn't matter.
looking forward to reading it! definitely skeptical about your erosion rates, will have to go do my own research later (quick look, USDA estimates for the Corn Belt (~5 tons/acre/year on average)). if your info is coming from one book then i'm doubly skeptical, though i would bet that a soil scientist would probably agree with me and i'm def wondering if you might've misread the book?
i'm not a farmer, but i do manage woodlands, have a huge garden, volunteered on farms over the years, worked in a sustainable ag non-profit, and have even tried distributing sweet potatoes, etc, so i have an avid interest in agriculture and our food system.
aside from the fact that the soil is one of the three most important components for growing food, therefore it's extremely important to take care of it if we want our species to live into future centuries... there is a lot of evidence that shows that industrial ag creates erosion problems (one easy example: all of the national forests in my area was degraded farm land that they converted to woodlands in the 30s, because they learned this fact that hard way then). believing that hunger is a solved problem because of 20th century style agriculture is a fallacy. the dust bowl is one historical example that shows how this system can fail spectacularly, and it's all based in how we manage the topsoil, a natural resource just like oil or water.
we lost the moment we tried to overcome natural systems with chemicals (we've had a good run but i believe it's gonna be an anomaly in history). you can use science + natural systems in your favor to grow food. taking care of the topsoil is objective number one. food is a byproduct of good soil. the soil is a living system and chemicals kill that ecosystem to our detriment.
technology is definitely not the answer here. you are welcome to go try to grow food on mars without soil. good luck!
I initially copied the wrong number, the correct number is 1mm per year, coming from a Unas Amherst study not Smil’s book. It’s high vs pre industrial rates, but not catastrophic and as Smil points out there are plenty of places where land being farmed industrially is gaining soil.
glad we're working from the same figure now. 1mm per year is not insignificant, and soil is not a renewable resource... probably a fine amount of soil loss for a farmer's lifetime, but a land manager needs to think over centuries and not in profit cycles.
> and as Smil points out there are plenty of places where land being farmed industrially is gaining soil.
i would bet at least $100 this happens where they do cover crops and actually manage the soil as a resource to be preserved
Thats 1mm in the upper Midwest around the Great Lakes, wind is doubtless a factor. You can’t generalize to all industrial ag from a dozen sites in 3 geographically similar states.
Right, but tillage is not a set in stone practice. The Nebraska Corn Board is now advocating no-til corn planting[1]. Apparently it's already dominant in Western Canada and more than half of Montana cropland is managed without tilling.
Herbicide is a whole different discussion and probably too deep a rabbit hole so far down thread.
Lake Texcoco was only partially drained by the Spanish. The big project to drain the lake was undertaken by President Porfirio Díaz in the early 1900s.
> Which is why Mexico City is now facing a severe water crisis
No it isn't. Mexico city has over extracted ground water for domestic and industrial use and is facing a drought, that's why they have a water crisis. It has nothing to do with the Spanish in the 17th century.
You're spouting a lot of a historical nonsense in this thread.
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).
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-...
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's arguably different if it's the same species (wolves and dogs are considered separate even if cross-breedable) - and very few of the chicken breeds are found in the wild.
I suppose it's because we assume "endangered in the wild" means something that doesn't breed well in captivity and so is hard to reintroduce.
> "This is a quite a unique situation, and I think the young female has a keen eye to actually spot it," [Chris Newman, director of the National Centre for Reptile Welfare, said]
I agree that it is odd, but it is unfortunately a natural consequence of the dilution of the term woman to include people in their 50s that up until yesterday were men.
We need a new term, kind of like how Thailand is handling the situation for so long. It is clear that there cannot be just two genders.
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).
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.
Yeah, you’d need a 1500 VA UPS to back it up, plus a decent amount of batteries (I don’t know the math on those, someone else figures that part out for me haha)
Aquarium circ pumps can probably be powered directly by 12VDC? That would make sense if it’s only $50 for battery backup.
Off Topic: when I came across the journalist/writer, Anne Cadwallader, I used to wonder about the origin of her surname. After reading this comment, I finally decide to look it up and found that her About page at https://www.annecadwallader.com/about explains it well:
> “Cadwallader” comes from the Welsh/Briton from Cadwaladr, meaning “battle leader” or “warrior” (cad ”battle” + gwaladr “leader/ruler”). The name dates back to the 7th century, notably held by King Cadwaladr of Gwynedd.
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.
"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."
Yeah: and none for Wales. There's a database (https://historical-boundaries-of-wales-rcahmw.hub.arcgis.com...), but I've never ever seen or heard anyone using this information to make land acknowledgements, nor can I find examples online. The last major genocide in Wales, to my knowledge, was over a thousand years ago: none of the cultures involved still exist in any meaningful form. The closest we have in modern times is events like Boddi Tryweryn (the 1965 destruction of Capel Celyn), and everybody knows about those.
You can't just take a cultural practice (land acknowledgements) from one part of the world (Abya Yala, Ahitereiria, Aotearoa, Te Waipounamu), and copy-paste it onto a different part of the world (Wales), and expect it to have the same significance. That's cultural appropriation, and it is frowned upon: by reducing the significance of an act to empty symbology and meaningless facade, you do harm in the trappings of a revolutionary activism intended, by its actual practitioners, to reduce and mitigate harm.
Ironically, I'm right now appropriating the vocabulary of those activists – probably incorrectly – in order to try to win an argument with no real significance, on a forum run by Venture Capital. But this isn't a particularly harmful thing for me to be doing (except perhaps to my reputation: what if the children call me cringe?), so I think it's alright.
Not so strange. I bought a puppet animal that seemed generic enough - the only animal type available at the magic store, and my girlfriend's boys declared "It's a coati!" She thought that they must have seen a fake animal on TV named that, but low and behold, google proved they were correct. It appeared to be a coati puppet.
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?
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 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:
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.
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 (:
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].
I stand corrected you are right there is no isolated use of [ɬ] in nahuatl as a phoneme it is used only in the context of an affricative /t͡ɬ/
I got ahead of myself in trying to isolate the sound [ɬ] for untrained ears.
To get back to the original point though if I'm not mistaken again in standard mexican spanish /ʃ/ as a phoneme is lost entirely and only appears in the affricative /t͡ʃ/? So in all likelihood the original /ʃ/ in axolotl would be pronounced by way of habit as [t͡ʃ] (unless again you have say a argentinian dialect where e.g. "ll" (/ʝ/) in llamar is pronounced as [ʃ]) if you try to "correct" mexican spanish speakers.
Is there a word for foreign loan words that have their pronounciation changed?
I feel like axolotl fits in that category as it’s a commonly known animal in the English speaking world, that has a common pronounciation remarkedly different from the language it came from.
Loan words going from English -> Asian languages like Thai and Japanese such as “beer” becoming “beeru” fit the same vein.
It does.. and I've never heard anyone say it that way (and I appreciate that you chose the only dictionary that gave anything close to your argument).. but that's still nothing like "ballot".
That is how Mexico used to be pronounced in Old Spanish. Kind of like how X is sometimes pronounced "sh" in Portuguese. The name was based on an indigenous name which had the "sh" sound there.
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.
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.
Oh, got ya - I thought they were talking about how English writes/pronounces its version of the word rather than how Nahuatl should do so! I agree fully in that case, it wouldn't make any sense at all for how foreign languages do something to dictate how another does - or to even expect them to be the same.
That’s like telling the Japanese that “cutlet” is not pronounced “katsu.” It ain’t gonna change. Or even having southerners pronounce squirrel with two sellable [autocorrect : syllables] Good luck with that!
At twelve cents for a half tail or twenty five cents for a full tail, I think I'll stick to just watching them climb trees and bury nuts. Especially since I'm expected to salt, straighten, and dry the tails first.
Yeah, they do sat they only want tails from squirrels harvested primarily for food; they don't expect or want people to hunt squirrels just the sell the tails.
We're speaking English, so why even entertain the idea of pronouncing "axolotl" differently, in that case? The Japanese say "en", but that doesn't seem to inspire anyone else not to say "yen".
That's because in English we get it via Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century). If we're going from Nahuatl direct to English, and the Nahuatl sound also exists in English, then you may as well just use the correct sound. Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
The misconception is that words enter "a language" and not individual people's minds. Most English speakers have never heard the word "axolotl" spoken in its original pronunciation, nor are they familiar with the orthography that spells a "sh" with X.
>Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century).
I don't know about 17th century, but some dialects of Spanish certainly do have that sound now.
>Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
In English, X at the start of a word is typically pronounced like a Z, as in "Xanadu", "Xanax", and "xylophone". I don't think anyone would bat an eye if you read it as "Zochimilco".
The 'sh' pronunciation is pretty well-known, in the UK at least, due to exposure to it in Catalan (particularly with CaixaBank) and Portuguese. I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.
And there's Xitter, of course, which is a fairly common way of referring to the social network formerly known as Twitter.
>I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.
Sorry, what? First, is the word "Xérès" well-known among English-speakers? Second, "México" isn't pronounced "méshico", so how is it a supporting argument at all?
It’s not a misconception that the English word ‘chocolate’ exists and that there’s a particular history of how that came to be the case. I think, reading the thread again, I didn’t make it clear that the sentence you quoted was talking about the history of ‘chocolate’ and not ‘axolotl’.
If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle, then of course you can do it. But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.
(And yes, ʃ does exist in some modern dialects of Spanish, but those aren’t the dialects that would influence the pronunciation of Spanish to English loan words in most cases. The interesting thing is that this was much less obviously the case in the early 1600s. Apparently the exact origin of ‘chocolate’ in Spanish is a bit of a complex historical linguistic puzzle.)
>If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle
No, not to me. I speak Spanish natively, but even I don't know how to say that. My first guess would be "Jochimilco", but I'd have to look it up (I'm not going to). I'm just saying that having Xs in weird places would not stop an English speaker from inventing a "wrong" pronunciation on the spot.
>But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.
"Mexico" itself is also not difficult for English speakers to approximate, yet they don't. Clearly approximating the local pronunciation is not how foreign speakers decide how to pay toponyms, and that's fine. That's how languages are shaped.
My point is just that it makes no sense to get hung up on speakers not pronouncing loanwords "correctly". If we're going down this path, we should also complain that Spanish speakers write "fútbol" instead of "football", and that tea is called "tea" instead of "cha" and spelled "荼". We should demand that words be crystallized in their pronunciation and orthography when they cross language barriers.
There aren’t any hard and fast rules about how to pronounce loan words. I agree on that point. In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation, which is an approach that’s equally valid (and is what English speakers often do for quite a few words).
>In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation,
When a pronunciation is already widespread, yes. "Axolotl" is not some new word; lots of people know the animal and call it "aksolotl". If we were talking about, say, some obscure Chinese village that suddenly became very relevant in the English-speaking world, I would not insist to pronounce the pinyin spelling of its name as if it was an English word.
Are you sure that x is an ecks and not a chi that straightened up a bit?
The thing about script and type is they only really work by prior agreement.
There is a set of marks on the page that we all agree on "is" an axolotl. How we choose to say that out loud is up to the individual. On the other hand, if we were to converse with you directly ... vocally ... then you could tell us how you say the name and if we were convinced that you were at least Mexican, we might follow your lead.
Script, type and sounds rarely match up precisely, ever.
I live in a town called Yeovil (Somerset, UK). I have a mug with at least 65 different spellings of the name over the last ~1900 odd years. It started off as Gifle "bend in the river" in a Saxon language. We have had a "great vowel shift" in "english" and three different varieties of "english" noted since then, just in these parts, let alone elsewhere.
The place name was spelt as Evil or Euil for a while! No-one batted an eyelid because the concept of the grammar nazi was a long way in the future and spelling was pretty random in general. Ivel, Ivol, Givelle and many more have been documented.
Please record how you say the name and make it available. Fiddling with text will never cut it.
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”
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.
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.
They are unique to like 2 lakes in Mexico. This is someone's pet that they dumped there. It would not have survived more than a week in Wales had it not been found.
Well it's native to the Xochimilco "lake system". Sometimes its hard to say what's a different lake or not but it's the same system of lakes. They also used to be in Lake Chalco which at certain times of the year could connect into the same lake as Xochimilco. Regardless, it's always been a tiny range
My understanding is they were in other mountainous areas as well in central Mexico but their habitat was much more reduced there so they went extinct even faster.
A. Velasci is definitely endangered in its natural habitats and it was also called Axolotl in nahuatl.
I don't think it is interesting to argue if there is one axolotl that is more important than the others, even if the one from Xochimilco has the particularity of staying in its larval state.
I'm not arguing one is more important than the other but only one of them is critically endangered and only one of them is a powerful cultural indigenous symbol.
Ambystoma velasci is also an "actual" salamander. The unique thing about the axolotl is that it never goes to the stage where it leaves the water. It is the only salamander species known to do this.
I think it likely speaks to how much more common they are as exotic pets than they have been in the past. That she found it before it died is surprising, and the longer I think about this story the longer I wonder if they just bought it as a pet and the river discovery was a gag for online clout.
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.
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.
We used to keep similar axolotls as pets. I believe the abandoned pet thing - they are fun for a while but then you wonder what to do with them. We donated ours and the tank to a school. They'd probably survive a while in the wild in the summer but I'm not sure they'd like winter much.
Yes I simply do not understand how these kind of stories pass the editors except that they are not important if wrong.
If this was some kind of crime they would have censored information for a long while if not clearly correct.
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.
> I find it hard to believe someone who would own one of these would not be an enthusiast
You underestimate how many people lack impulse control or consideration over their choices, and their lack of understanding of consequences when buying a living organism.
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.
FTA: the nine-inch Mexican axolotl
There aren’t many baby salamanders that size, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_giant_salamander#Breed... says “external gills remain until a length of about 20 cm (8 in) at an age of 3 years”, so it could be. I wouldn’t know whether these look similar, though.
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.
Amazing to see all of the things kids have been finding these days!
Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/75848
‘It Had Teeth’: A 3-Year-Old Discovers Ancient Treasure in Israel While on a hike with her family, a child stumbled across a 3,800-year-old Egyptian amulet. It will go on display in an upcoming exhibition. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/world/middleeast/child-an...
Sarah Huckabee Sanders' kids scream with excitement after finding 2,000-year-old coins in West Bank cave https://www.foxnews.com/travel/sarah-huckabee-sanders-kids-s...
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
Thanks, that's the clarification I was not getting from TFA.
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
How it was (a great interactive 3d reconstruction)
https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/
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 :)
> 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.
---
> 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
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1217241110
That article you linked doesn't mention Xochimilco at all so I have no clue what you're quoting. I can't find a single source for your 80 tons claim (other than some blog post that cites another blog post), which if true and I suspect it isn't is 20 tons less per hectare than many conventional vegetables like cabbage and tomatoes. Other sources I found cite a number that's less than half of what you're claiming. Do you have a real source that isn't a blog post?
>Post-industrial agriculture is not actually more productive per area. It's just more productive per input labor.
This is alarmingly false. As I pointed out many conventional vegetables yield 100 tons per hectare today. Moreover yes they are more productive per unit of labor. The Mexica and their contemporary polities around Lake Texcoco were miserable slave societies that used armies of captured war salves (tlacotin) to perform much of the work. They also used unpaid corvee labor through the coatequitl system, and serfs known as mayeques. So honestly its quite the social advancement that we don't have to press people into agricultural labor at spear point anymore.
> Agricultural yields within the most densely populated and productive preindustrial land-use systems compared well with modern yields
The references for this quote are about South East Asian rice agriculture, which today is still done more or less done the way it was in premodern times. This quote doesn't support your argument and is at best deceptive.
I was addressing two separate points you made. I thought the "---" would make that clear.
> This is alarmingly false.
I'm sorry but I can't take your comment more seriously than a paper published in a respected journal that has been cited 1,099 times. It provides 4 sources to back up the claim I posted.
In scholarship on land use history this is pretty well accepted.
---
As for the specific chinampas yields, such high yields shouldn't be surprising when you have 4-7 harvest per year and require no periods of being fallow.
The UN's FAO provides more specific breakdowns on yields on page 22 of their report
https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/cd8...
You're have to download it but the designation also has more specific figures
https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/ba8d198e-a18b-4541-b94b-...
Your source says:
> It is clear that the yield per crop varies depending on the species and variety sown. However, in the case of the chinampas, yields are between 10 to 15 tonnes/hectare. An average of 12.5 tons/ha
That's not 80 tons per hectare as you stated.
> I'm sorry but I can't take your comment more seriously than a paper published in a respected journal that has been cited 1,099 times
You took the quote out of context, it's about rice agriculture in South East Asia, not Xochimilco. I check the citations and you obviously didn’t.
You are blatantly making things up here and trying to back your bullshit claims with papers that you are misrepresenting.
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 many years can they maintain that without petroleum inputs?
Ammonia can be generated through electrolysis as feed-stock for Haber-Bosch to get nitrogen, so literally forever. The reason we use petroleum is because it's currently cheaper than solar PV electrolysis.
Sure, but it would take some time to transition to ramp up production to the scale required by world-scale agriculture. We're using petroleum for this because it was cheap & easy. Not saying we can't transition, but it will take time.
Right, but it's possible with existing tech and there's no scenario where oil disappears all at once. Its a highly geographically distributed resource.
Who cares? Fertilizer is nitrogen that literally comes out of the air. Erosion is vastly overstated by permaculture enthusiasts and can be mitigated vy changes to tillage and irrigation. Erosion in the Midwest clocks in at about 0.04 mm per year, but there's plenty of new soil deposition around the Mississippi. It's a manageable issue.
this is extremely wrong, but anyway back to my day because there is just too much wrong in this to respond to each wrong phrase
Extremely wrong how? There's a great an well sourced section in Vaclav Smil's How to Feed the World about this very topic. I also cited a specific erosion figure. But I guess that doesn't matter.
looking forward to reading it! definitely skeptical about your erosion rates, will have to go do my own research later (quick look, USDA estimates for the Corn Belt (~5 tons/acre/year on average)). if your info is coming from one book then i'm doubly skeptical, though i would bet that a soil scientist would probably agree with me and i'm def wondering if you might've misread the book?
i'm not a farmer, but i do manage woodlands, have a huge garden, volunteered on farms over the years, worked in a sustainable ag non-profit, and have even tried distributing sweet potatoes, etc, so i have an avid interest in agriculture and our food system.
aside from the fact that the soil is one of the three most important components for growing food, therefore it's extremely important to take care of it if we want our species to live into future centuries... there is a lot of evidence that shows that industrial ag creates erosion problems (one easy example: all of the national forests in my area was degraded farm land that they converted to woodlands in the 30s, because they learned this fact that hard way then). believing that hunger is a solved problem because of 20th century style agriculture is a fallacy. the dust bowl is one historical example that shows how this system can fail spectacularly, and it's all based in how we manage the topsoil, a natural resource just like oil or water.
we lost the moment we tried to overcome natural systems with chemicals (we've had a good run but i believe it's gonna be an anomaly in history). you can use science + natural systems in your favor to grow food. taking care of the topsoil is objective number one. food is a byproduct of good soil. the soil is a living system and chemicals kill that ecosystem to our detriment.
technology is definitely not the answer here. you are welcome to go try to grow food on mars without soil. good luck!
I initially copied the wrong number, the correct number is 1mm per year, coming from a Unas Amherst study not Smil’s book. It’s high vs pre industrial rates, but not catastrophic and as Smil points out there are plenty of places where land being farmed industrially is gaining soil.
glad we're working from the same figure now. 1mm per year is not insignificant, and soil is not a renewable resource... probably a fine amount of soil loss for a farmer's lifetime, but a land manager needs to think over centuries and not in profit cycles.
> and as Smil points out there are plenty of places where land being farmed industrially is gaining soil.
i would bet at least $100 this happens where they do cover crops and actually manage the soil as a resource to be preserved
Thats 1mm in the upper Midwest around the Great Lakes, wind is doubtless a factor. You can’t generalize to all industrial ag from a dozen sites in 3 geographically similar states.
wind is definitely a factor, especially after you remove all the plant life through tillage and herbicide!
Right, but tillage is not a set in stone practice. The Nebraska Corn Board is now advocating no-til corn planting[1]. Apparently it's already dominant in Western Canada and more than half of Montana cropland is managed without tilling.
Herbicide is a whole different discussion and probably too deep a rabbit hole so far down thread.
[1] https://nebraskacorn.gov/cornstalk/corn101/what-is-no-till-f...
agreed on no-till! seeing it at scale is promising
This is a large reason I see erosion as a non issue long term.
Lake Texcoco was only partially drained by the Spanish. The big project to drain the lake was undertaken by President Porfirio Díaz in the early 1900s.
> Which is why Mexico City is now facing a severe water crisis
No it isn't. Mexico city has over extracted ground water for domestic and industrial use and is facing a drought, that's why they have a water crisis. It has nothing to do with the Spanish in the 17th century.
You're spouting a lot of a historical nonsense in this thread.
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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).
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-...
"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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
Well played, sir or madam.
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.
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.
There is in fact a difference between domesticated animals and wild animals that are kept as pets.
Do you also find it strange that e.g. various wolves are/have been considered endangered even though dogs exist?
It's arguably different if it's the same species (wolves and dogs are considered separate even if cross-breedable) - and very few of the chicken breeds are found in the wild.
I suppose it's because we assume "endangered in the wild" means something that doesn't breed well in captivity and so is hard to reintroduce.
the pet ones are almostly entirely captive bred so they are pretty distinct by now
I believe all captive ones are cross-bred, so are distinct from the native species
> "This is a quite a unique situation, and I think the young female has a keen eye to actually spot it," [Chris Newman, director of the National Centre for Reptile Welfare, said]
What an odd thing to say.
Why so? It seems both things are true.
I believe the odd part is "young female" phrasing. And I agree, it is odd.
I agree that it is odd, but it is unfortunately a natural consequence of the dilution of the term woman to include people in their 50s that up until yesterday were men.
We need a new term, kind of like how Thailand is handling the situation for so long. It is clear that there cannot be just two genders.
And naturally an article about a misplaced house pet summons commentary on transgender rights.
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).
I stopped trying to correct my kid about wildlife facts when he turned 5…
> 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.
Yeah, you’d need a 1500 VA UPS to back it up, plus a decent amount of batteries (I don’t know the math on those, someone else figures that part out for me haha)
Aquarium circ pumps can probably be powered directly by 12VDC? That would make sense if it’s only $50 for battery backup.
First time I learnt about it was while reading The Book of Barely Imagined Beings. Fantastic book.
They're also a symbol for asexuality, or at least they were where I grew up.
Is this because of Yolanda, the ace axolotl, in the show BoJack Horseman?
Why did she name him Dippy and not a proper Welsh name like "Cadwaladr" or "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch?"
Off Topic: when I came across the journalist/writer, Anne Cadwallader, I used to wonder about the origin of her surname. After reading this comment, I finally decide to look it up and found that her About page at https://www.annecadwallader.com/about explains it well:
> “Cadwallader” comes from the Welsh/Briton from Cadwaladr, meaning “battle leader” or “warrior” (cad ”battle” + gwaladr “leader/ruler”). The name dates back to the 7th century, notably held by King Cadwaladr of Gwynedd.
I think her family was visiting Wales, rather than being natives :)
Indeed. The article says the family was visiting from Leicester.
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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."
There are many good examples online if you care to actually do it rather than perform ironic questioning as an art form.
Yeah: and none for Wales. There's a database (https://historical-boundaries-of-wales-rcahmw.hub.arcgis.com...), but I've never ever seen or heard anyone using this information to make land acknowledgements, nor can I find examples online. The last major genocide in Wales, to my knowledge, was over a thousand years ago: none of the cultures involved still exist in any meaningful form. The closest we have in modern times is events like Boddi Tryweryn (the 1965 destruction of Capel Celyn), and everybody knows about those.
You can't just take a cultural practice (land acknowledgements) from one part of the world (Abya Yala, Ahitereiria, Aotearoa, Te Waipounamu), and copy-paste it onto a different part of the world (Wales), and expect it to have the same significance. That's cultural appropriation, and it is frowned upon: by reducing the significance of an act to empty symbology and meaningless facade, you do harm in the trappings of a revolutionary activism intended, by its actual practitioners, to reduce and mitigate harm.
Ironically, I'm right now appropriating the vocabulary of those activists – probably incorrectly – in order to try to win an argument with no real significance, on a forum run by Venture Capital. But this isn't a particularly harmful thing for me to be doing (except perhaps to my reputation: what if the children call me cringe?), so I think it's alright.
rerewhiner
"siliogogogoch" for short :)
I don’t know how they know it’s an axolotl and not a newt larva. If it’s the latter it’ll be very jarring when it changes forms later
Have you looked at the article? The specimen would be quite huge for a newt larva, no?
> 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
Not so strange. I bought a puppet animal that seemed generic enough - the only animal type available at the magic store, and my girlfriend's boys declared "It's a coati!" She thought that they must have seen a fake animal on TV named that, but low and behold, google proved they were correct. It appeared to be a coati puppet.
Even if you are an endangered species, humans wont leave you alone.
Imagine if it were the other way around:
Mexican axolotl, 10, finds rare Girl under Welsh bridge.
And how we would react if it catched her and put her in a small cage.
That would make her description in the article as a "young female" a little more fitting, at least.
The BBC paywall for US users is really a bummer
well good thing she was 10
Imagine axolotl husband now cries of missing wife.
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.
*Pronunciation
Hey, that was the american spelling.
whoosh
*wush
i think it's actually a whoosh for you :-)
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 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?
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].
I stand corrected you are right there is no isolated use of [ɬ] in nahuatl as a phoneme it is used only in the context of an affricative /t͡ɬ/ I got ahead of myself in trying to isolate the sound [ɬ] for untrained ears.
To get back to the original point though if I'm not mistaken again in standard mexican spanish /ʃ/ as a phoneme is lost entirely and only appears in the affricative /t͡ʃ/? So in all likelihood the original /ʃ/ in axolotl would be pronounced by way of habit as [t͡ʃ] (unless again you have say a argentinian dialect where e.g. "ll" (/ʝ/) in llamar is pronounced as [ʃ]) if you try to "correct" mexican spanish speakers.
Is there a word for foreign loan words that have their pronounciation changed?
I feel like axolotl fits in that category as it’s a commonly known animal in the English speaking world, that has a common pronounciation remarkedly different from the language it came from.
Loan words going from English -> Asian languages like Thai and Japanese such as “beer” becoming “beeru” fit the same vein.
No the "X" is pronounced "ten" like in "Mac OS X"
Makes sense. I am running MacOS Tahoetl.
And "valet" is supposed to rhyme with "ballot" not "ballet" but you'll still sound like an idiot if you say "take your car to the val-it"
What's your reference? Cambridge: /ˈvæl.eɪ/ https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/valet
(britannica[0], merriam-webster[1])
[0]: https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/eb/audio?word=va%2Alet...
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/valet
Your Merriam Webster source has "val-it" as the first pronunciation (but I think in this case both are correct and valit is less common)
It does.. and I've never heard anyone say it that way (and I appreciate that you chose the only dictionary that gave anything close to your argument).. but that's still nothing like "ballot".
Drink some clarit with the valit over a good filit.
Jeeves (the gentleman's personal gentleman) is a valet that would be pronounced VAL-et.
Or like Meshico
That is how Mexico used to be pronounced in Old Spanish. Kind of like how X is sometimes pronounced "sh" in Portuguese. The name was based on an indigenous name which had the "sh" sound there.
> Kind of like how X is sometimes pronounced "sh" in Portuguese.
Including this case! México is still pronounced with the "sh" in Portuguese :)
Nobody says it your way - https://youglish.com/pronounce/axolotl/english
Given the damage to the abdomen, we might infer it was axed a little.
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.
Oh, got ya - I thought they were talking about how English writes/pronounces its version of the word rather than how Nahuatl should do so! I agree fully in that case, it wouldn't make any sense at all for how foreign languages do something to dictate how another does - or to even expect them to be the same.
If you're speaking Spanish yes.
That’s like telling the Japanese that “cutlet” is not pronounced “katsu.” It ain’t gonna change. Or even having southerners pronounce squirrel with two sellable [autocorrect : syllables] Good luck with that!
> two sellable
I'm a southerner and we generally have squirrels in plentiful quantities, so it's never occurred to me to sell them. /s
Mepps buys the tails, they make fishing lures from them: https://www.mepps.com/squirrel-tail/
At twelve cents for a half tail or twenty five cents for a full tail, I think I'll stick to just watching them climb trees and bury nuts. Especially since I'm expected to salt, straighten, and dry the tails first.
Yeah, they do sat they only want tails from squirrels harvested primarily for food; they don't expect or want people to hunt squirrels just the sell the tails.
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"Shocolate"? Who says it like that?
People speaking languages other than English.
We're speaking English, so why even entertain the idea of pronouncing "axolotl" differently, in that case? The Japanese say "en", but that doesn't seem to inspire anyone else not to say "yen".
That's because in English we get it via Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century). If we're going from Nahuatl direct to English, and the Nahuatl sound also exists in English, then you may as well just use the correct sound. Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
>That's because in English we get it via Spanish
The misconception is that words enter "a language" and not individual people's minds. Most English speakers have never heard the word "axolotl" spoken in its original pronunciation, nor are they familiar with the orthography that spells a "sh" with X.
>Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century).
I don't know about 17th century, but some dialects of Spanish certainly do have that sound now.
>Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
In English, X at the start of a word is typically pronounced like a Z, as in "Xanadu", "Xanax", and "xylophone". I don't think anyone would bat an eye if you read it as "Zochimilco".
The 'sh' pronunciation is pretty well-known, in the UK at least, due to exposure to it in Catalan (particularly with CaixaBank) and Portuguese. I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.
And there's Xitter, of course, which is a fairly common way of referring to the social network formerly known as Twitter.
>I suspect that most people here would guess that Spanish still pronounces it that way too, thanks to México and Xérès / Sherry.
Sorry, what? First, is the word "Xérès" well-known among English-speakers? Second, "México" isn't pronounced "méshico", so how is it a supporting argument at all?
It’s not a misconception that the English word ‘chocolate’ exists and that there’s a particular history of how that came to be the case. I think, reading the thread again, I didn’t make it clear that the sentence you quoted was talking about the history of ‘chocolate’ and not ‘axolotl’.
If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle, then of course you can do it. But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.
(And yes, ʃ does exist in some modern dialects of Spanish, but those aren’t the dialects that would influence the pronunciation of Spanish to English loan words in most cases. The interesting thing is that this was much less obviously the case in the early 1600s. Apparently the exact origin of ‘chocolate’ in Spanish is a bit of a complex historical linguistic puzzle.)
>If pronouncing Xochimilco according to English orthographic conventions is important to you as a matter of principle
No, not to me. I speak Spanish natively, but even I don't know how to say that. My first guess would be "Jochimilco", but I'd have to look it up (I'm not going to). I'm just saying that having Xs in weird places would not stop an English speaker from inventing a "wrong" pronunciation on the spot.
>But it’s a Mexican place name that has a canonical pronunciation that is not difficult for English speakers to approximate, so I can’t really see the point.
"Mexico" itself is also not difficult for English speakers to approximate, yet they don't. Clearly approximating the local pronunciation is not how foreign speakers decide how to pay toponyms, and that's fine. That's how languages are shaped.
My point is just that it makes no sense to get hung up on speakers not pronouncing loanwords "correctly". If we're going down this path, we should also complain that Spanish speakers write "fútbol" instead of "football", and that tea is called "tea" instead of "cha" and spelled "荼". We should demand that words be crystallized in their pronunciation and orthography when they cross language barriers.
There aren’t any hard and fast rules about how to pronounce loan words. I agree on that point. In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation, which is an approach that’s equally valid (and is what English speakers often do for quite a few words).
>In your original post, though, you seemed to be entirely dismissing the option of pronouncing the word according to an English approximation of its native pronunciation,
When a pronunciation is already widespread, yes. "Axolotl" is not some new word; lots of people know the animal and call it "aksolotl". If we were talking about, say, some obscure Chinese village that suddenly became very relevant in the English-speaking world, I would not insist to pronounce the pinyin spelling of its name as if it was an English word.
Yeah, I actually wasn’t aware that axolotl was an established English word, so I was more in your hypothetical “Chinese village” mindset.
Not really - it is [t͡ʃ] (“ch”) not [ʃ] (“sh”).
Auf Deutsch, Schokolade. /ʃoko/, per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schokolade.
Any self-respecting Aztecophile. They're also the cause of startup names dropping a vowl. Insufferable.
Are you sure that x is an ecks and not a chi that straightened up a bit?
The thing about script and type is they only really work by prior agreement.
There is a set of marks on the page that we all agree on "is" an axolotl. How we choose to say that out loud is up to the individual. On the other hand, if we were to converse with you directly ... vocally ... then you could tell us how you say the name and if we were convinced that you were at least Mexican, we might follow your lead.
Script, type and sounds rarely match up precisely, ever.
I live in a town called Yeovil (Somerset, UK). I have a mug with at least 65 different spellings of the name over the last ~1900 odd years. It started off as Gifle "bend in the river" in a Saxon language. We have had a "great vowel shift" in "english" and three different varieties of "english" noted since then, just in these parts, let alone elsewhere.
The place name was spelt as Evil or Euil for a while! No-one batted an eyelid because the concept of the grammar nazi was a long way in the future and spelling was pretty random in general. Ivel, Ivol, Givelle and many more have been documented.
Please record how you say the name and make it available. Fiddling with text will never cut it.
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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.
I hope this assertion ages well.
It might not. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877088
Yeah, but the water temperature at this time of year is still pretty cold.
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?
Because Wales is not its wild
These damn mexican immigrants are everywhere! Just kidding. I love you mexican folks, just couldn't miss the joke
This is so unlikely to happen. There is a good chance that they are not as rare as we currently think, at least in that particular area.
They are unique to like 2 lakes in Mexico. This is someone's pet that they dumped there. It would not have survived more than a week in Wales had it not been found.
There were more than 2 lakes but the specy is almost extinct so these areas are where you can still find some.
Well it's native to the Xochimilco "lake system". Sometimes its hard to say what's a different lake or not but it's the same system of lakes. They also used to be in Lake Chalco which at certain times of the year could connect into the same lake as Xochimilco. Regardless, it's always been a tiny range
My understanding is they were in other mountainous areas as well in central Mexico but their habitat was much more reduced there so they went extinct even faster.
one example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382147531_Chronicle...
This paper is about the closely related Ambystoma velasci. The axolotl is Ambystoma mexicanum.
They are closely related enough that there's some evidence of hybridization but they are separate species. A. velasci is not endangered.
A. Velasci is definitely endangered in its natural habitats and it was also called Axolotl in nahuatl.
I don't think it is interesting to argue if there is one axolotl that is more important than the others, even if the one from Xochimilco has the particularity of staying in its larval state.
Ambystoma velasci is actually classified as "Least Concern" by the IUCN
https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/62130287/53974804
I'm not arguing one is more important than the other but only one of them is critically endangered and only one of them is a powerful cultural indigenous symbol.
Ambystoma velasci is also an "actual" salamander. The unique thing about the axolotl is that it never goes to the stage where it leaves the water. It is the only salamander species known to do this.
I think it likely speaks to how much more common they are as exotic pets than they have been in the past. That she found it before it died is surprising, and the longer I think about this story the longer I wonder if they just bought it as a pet and the river discovery was a gag for online clout.
why is your reply faded
That means it is downvoted
One in a million chances happen nine times out of ten.
Especially with 8 billion humans wandering around.