The axolotl has nearly disappeared from its natural habitat

There are worries about those in captivity, though:

> By the time that day comes, however, the wild axolotl may be gone. That worries Gardiner and Sandoval Guzmán because the animals that they study, like many lab animals, are highly inbred. Scientists use an ‘inbreeding coefficient’ to measure how small a gene pool is. Identical twins have a coefficient of 100%; totally unrelated individuals would score close to zero. A score above 12% indicates a population in which individuals are mostly breeding with their first cousins, and is considered a serious concern by ecologists and geneticists. The famously inbred and unhealthy Spanish Habsburg kings of the seventeenth century often had a coefficient somewhere above 20%. The average axolotl inbreeding coefficient is 35%.

There may be high numbers in captivity, but those will be genetically very similar.

You may be interested in learning more about genetic drift and effective population size, it should clear things up:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/Genetic-Drift-and-...

It just means they're headed for extinction in the wild, but that some populations are maintained in captivity. The term 'domestication' would not normally be used in this case, because it relates to the selection of improvement traits in some resource or behavior useful to humans.

The article makes the point that the problem isn't that there are very few axolotls left, but that the non-wild ones are very inbred. This makes them prone to mass die-off from disease. They also accumulate genetic abnormalities that make them less useful to scientific research - notably into limb development and regeneration.

Presumably they don't want to wreck the ecosystem of other species. I mean you can't exactly order up an empty habitat on Amazon, though I'm sure Alexa is now working furiously on the concept in case any of the Axiolotls have money.

We're losing so much of our planet's biota, and at such a catastrophic pace (eg 58% decline in vertebrate abundance since 1970), that it's hard to know where to concentrate resources. This is an ongoing debate amongst ecologists. There's a fundamental quandary: the problem is planetary, a specieswise response is known to be inadequate, but it's the only one on offer.

Bats are major pollinators... we are so cooked.

"The species originates from numerous lakes, such as Lake Xochimilco underlying Mexico City... As of 2010, wild axolotls were near extinction due to urbanization in Mexico City and consequent water pollution, as well as the introduction of invasive species such as tilapia and perch... Surveys in 1998, 2003 and 2008 found 6,000, 1,000 and 100 axolotls per square kilometer in its Lake Xochimilco habitat, respectively. A four-month-long search in 2013, however, turned up no surviving individuals in the wild. Just a month later, two wild ones were spotted in a network of canals leading from Xochimilco." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axolotl

Small cities too. Floodplain management is the farmer, so from 2010: 10.3368/er.28.3.257 (so, _Ecological Restoration_) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240812159_Creating_...

No idea how long the eggs can aestivate. Nice genetics/biocaching crossover there.

I hoped to see a nationload (MX, BR, something) of LEED living roof that included or adjoined estuary, I guess we know the jaguar (ocelot...) is less a hazard. It just has to be nicer to keep occupied canopy over most of the estuary (so birds don't run off with the cache in minutes) than it is to run ventilation or spend marginal time (¨) on cash crops.

http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/hope-for-the-axolotl is nice. Maybe every kid needs a little Nausicä dungeon, bugs and all.

The Pokémon Mudkip was also inspired by the axolotl!

"How to Train Your Dragon" was directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois who were directors and character designers of "Lilo & Stitch".

So Toothless was inspired by Stitch and, probably, cats.