Study buoys hope for rare axolotls

Axolotls — the cute and charismatic creatures made famous by the video game “Minecraft” — are in a free fall.

Pollution, modern farming and the introduction of invasive fish that prey on the critically endangered species have reduced their habitat to the channels of a single lake in Mexico.

But a new study is offering a glimmer of hope: Captive-bred axolotls can survive in the wild, Justine McDaniel reported for The Washington Post.

“This is a huge step, because in conservation programs when you have animals in captivity and you take them back to the wild … there’s a lot of mortality,” Alejandra Ramos, the study’s lead author and a science faculty member at the Autonomous University of Baja California in Mexico, told the Post.

Axolotls have long been bred in labs — and are a popular aquarium pet — but boosting their numbers in the wild has proven to be a much greater challenge.

The study tagged 18 axolotls with radio transmitters that would allow them to be tracked, then released eight into Mexico City’s Lake Xochimilco and 10 into a man-made wetland. At least twice a day for 40 days, researchers visited the sites to collect data.

Notably, the researchers found that the axolotls introduced to a man-made pond also survived — a promising finding for the potential of artificial wetlands to aid axolotl conservation, the study authors said.

That finding matters in the event that their habitat doesn’t recover or climate change worsens, Esther Quintero, a Conservation International-Mexico biologist, told The Washington Post.

“It’s kind of like having a Plan B,” she said. “One can at least be sure that we have two different places in which we can restart the population.”

Conservation International is supporting a project in Lake Xochimilco to restore the axolotl’s natural habitat by returning to ancestral farming practices. By supporting farmers’ transition to pesticide-free farming and helping install biofilters to clean the water, the project aims to restore these waters so axolotls can thrive into the future.

“Saving the axolotl goes beyond liking this creature that is really adorable,” Quintero told the Post. “There is no future for any species without its habitat.”

Read the full story from The Washington Post here.

Mary Kate McCoy is a staff writer at Conservation International. Want to read more stories like this? Sign up for email updates. Also, please consider supporting our critical work.