Ready to learn all about Axolotls? Let’s go!
Shrouded in mystery, and defying typical biological laws like metamorphosis, the axolotl (pronounced AX-oh-lot-ul), a type of salamander, keeps its webbed feet firmly placed in infancy throughout its life.
Unlike other salamanders – axolotls are neotenic, meaning they keep juvenile characteristics into adulthood. The axolotl remains aquatic (like larvae) their entire life. Though it develops functional lungs, it uses its fancy, feathery gills to breathe underwater. Like youngsters, they retain external gills, a tail, and a body fin, and lack moveable eyelids.
Axolotls are dark-colored and can shift their hue a few shades lighter or darker as needed for camouflage! Pink and light-colored axolotls are bred by humans as pets for their “pleasing” shades.
They are also used in laboratories to study another superpower: regenerating their limbs, lungs, heart, jaws, spines, and even parts of their brain! Scientists have found that axolotls can regrow a new limb five times perfectly, in a few weeks—without even a scar. Every tissue is replaced: skin, bone, cartilage, muscle, and stem cells. Other organs can regenerate countless times and be completely functional. Naturally, scientists would like to harness that ability and apply it to human medicine.
It is said that the Axolotls are over 1,000 times more resistant to cancer than mammals—another amazing superpower worth investigating.
The Axolotl is lentic, meaning it inhabits still-water lakes. They occur in only two: Mexico’s Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco, where they are Critically Endangered due to pollution, habitat degradation, and water diversion from an ever-growing human population.