Amphibians are not often considered charismatic. The axolotl is different.
With its ear-to-ear grin, pink feathery headdress of gills and
frantic underwater dance, this amphibian has captivated generations of
admirers. Once revered by Aztecs, today the axolotl appears in many
forms. It is a symbol for Mexican national identity in anthropologist
Roger Bartra’s book La Jaula de la Melancolia (The Cage of
Melancholy); Mexican muralist Diego Rivera includes axolotl swimming
near a male figure’s genitals—the center of creation—in his mural “Water, Origin of Life.”
You may have heard of the axolotl because its image is so
ubiquitous—and so, it seems, is it. Millions of the creatures thrive
around the world. The axolotl is a popular pet, particularly in Japan,
where they are bred so widely that they are also served deep-fried at
some restaurants. They are also distributed so commonly to labs for
research that they are basically the white mice of amphibians, thanks to
their unique genetic profile and their potential to unlock the secrets
of evolution and regeneration.
But few realize that, in nature, the axolotl is in peril. It is native only to Lake Xochimilco, a UNESCO World Heritage site outside Mexico City, where it has long played a role in Mexican tradition. And there, it is on the brink of extinction.
In 2006, the species was declared critically endangered due
to habitat degradation and the pervasiveness of invasive fish in the
lake, introduced decades ago in a well-intentioned attempt to create
fisheries and alleviate food insecurity. In 2009, experts estimated that
the axolotl population had fallen 90 percent in the past four years, a
decline further exacerbated by urbanization. In 2015, scientists briefly
believed that the critter might have gone fully extinct in the wild—only to find one a few weeks later.
When Luis Zambrano started working with the
axolotl in 2002, he knew only a little about the curious critter’s
cultural significance to Mexico and their popularity throughout the
world. Zambrano, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of
Mexico (UNAM), had previously focused on food webs of fish; he started
working with axolotls when fellow researchers in his lab asked if he
would help them find axolotl in his by-catch. He was eventually
instrumental in designating the axolotl as a threatened species and is
now the leading expert on their conservation.
At first, Zambrano dreaded working the
amphibians. Axolotls are frustratingly difficult to catch (besides that,
there are very few left) and the local people initially didn’t seem
keen to work with him, he says. But as he learned of the animals’ rich
cultural and biological significance, he quickly grew entranced by the
amphibians. He even found a connection to his prior research: as aquatic
predators, axolotls are highly important in food webs. Zambrano started
to explore how they interact with different species, how they predate,
and how they are preyed upon. “It was like starting with a bad date and falling in love,” he laughs now.
According to Zambrano, axolotls face a
variety of threats in their natural habitat. They are only found in Lake
Xochimilco, but Lake Xochimilco is suffering. The lake system is highly
eutrophic, meaning it is so rich in nutrients from agricultural runoff
that the booming plant life kills the endemic species by depriving them
of oxygen. Invasive Asiatic carp and tilapia, introduced by the
government to increase food security in underserved communities, have
now supplanted the axolotl as the top predators, and are known for
picking off the scrumptious juveniles.
Pollution from Mexico City is also an issue: strong storms can
cause the city’s sewer system to overflow and release human waste into
Lake Xochimilco. With their permeable amphibian skin, axolotls are
particularly vulnerable to the ammonia, heavy metals, and other toxins
carried by human excrement.
At the same time, Mexico City is rapidly expanding, and outlying areas like Xochilmilco become hotbeds for legal and illegal development. Developers view areas like Xochimilco opportunistically
and have been grabbing up permits for large-scale developments in
critical areas. As people migrate to Mexico City for work, those who
cannot afford to live in the central areas look for places to live on
the outskirts. Zambrano has observed that not only is the axolotl
stressed by noise, but the rapid urbanization also presents untold
threats to its only habitat.
The problem is, having captive populations of axolotls is not enough, says Randal Voss,
a biologist at the University of Kentucky. Voss, who maintains a
collection of axolotls for distribution to labs around the world as
Resource Director of the Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center,
knows the problem intimately. When he looks at his pedigree records, he
knows the stock is inbred and thus has less genetic diversity due to
the mating between related animals.
In one sense, a homogeneous stock can be good for science, as it is
much more likely to facilitate reproducible studies. “On the other
hand, it can compromise the health of a captive population,” Voss
explains.
Captive populations are more vulnerable to catastrophe. Disease, or
even an accidental fire, could wipe out an entire lab population almost
instantaneously. Between the inbreeding and efforts to cross the
axolotl with the tiger salamander to introduce some genetic diversity,
the collection is also very different than the wild populations; not
only are their genomes different, but they are highly domesticated and
adapted to humans.
Researchers like Voss are working on
sequencing the wild axolotl genome, but the sheer size of the genome and
the lack of access to wild populations means they have not yet
completed it. If the animals went extinct before they could complete the
sequencing, they would lose the groundwork for many studies that use
the axolotl’s unique molecular toolbox.
They aren’t unique in this trait. “Regeneration is not special or
specific to axolotl,” Voss explains, “It’s just that the axolotl is the
best model amongst all the salamanders for doing this research.”
Moreover, axolotls have enormous embryos, the largest amongst amphibians, which are useful for stem cell research. Yet perhaps the axolotl’s most crucial trait to scientists goes back to that adorable baby face.
Few realize that the lovable, cotton-candy-pink amphibian is on the edge of extinction.
Axolotls are richly represented in captivity. These two, at the
Vancouver Aquarium, are leucistic, meaning they have less pigmentation
than normal. ..... Axolotls are neotenic, which means that unlike other amphibians,
they reach sexual maturity without undergoing metamorphosis. Frogs, for
example, are aged tadpoles; axolotls maintain their youthful, larval
visage throughout all stages of their lives. Axolotls evolutionarily
shed the thyroid hormone that triggers metamorphosis to adapt to
habitats with low levels of iodine and other resources necessary for maturation.
And because axolotls don’t go through metamorphosis, they don’t
depend on the seasons and other environmental factors for breeding. That
means scientists can breed them throughout the course of the year.
Axolotls may also offer insight to the genetic controls that regulate
the switch in life for processes like puberty.
With the race against the clock growing ever pressing, the axolotl
conservation efforts ramped up in the early 2000s with a proposed
captive breeding and species reintroduction project. Richard Griffiths, professor of biological conservation at the University of Kent and leader of the axolotl conservation efforts for the Darwin Initiative,
the UK Government’s funding program to assist with biological diversity
projects in the developing world, recognized early on that
reintroduction was a long shot given the threats to the species in Lake
Xochimilco.
“There really wouldn’t be any point to doing captive breeding and
reintroduction,” Griffiths explains. “One of the rules of captive
breeding is you have to sort the threats out first.”
Thus, the team developed an action plan in 2004
to raise the profile of the axolotl in the local community through
education programs, workshops, and public meetings. They focused on
integrating the axolotl into the tourism in the community. One of
Griffiths’s favorite projects was the training programs for romeros, or boatmen, to become guides for tours about the axolotl for tourists visiting the lake.
“It’s the best captive audience,” Griffiths jokes. “You have eight people in a boat, and they can’t get off!” Local businesses like La Casita del Axolotl
breed axolotls for sale and conduct tours with their guests and
clients. “We work with the tourism that we see at the traditional
piers,” explains Karen Perez, one of the managers of La Casita del
Axolotl. “We give our guests an explanation about axolotls and what they
can do for them.”
The local community was always essential
for the axolotl conservation efforts. The difficult method of collecting
axolotls—searching for subtle bubbles and casting the net just
right—that is needed for censuses is hard to teach, but it is a skill
that is passed down through generations of local fishermen. It wasn’t always smooth sailing in Xochimilco. “When I started to work in Xochimilco, it was not easy,” Zambrano says.
Locals distrust scientists, who have historically exploited the
community for data in the past without coming back or paying them
sufficiently. Zambrano approached the relationship differently. He knew
the community had all the knowledge he needed, so he offered his data
collecting skills and credibility as a way for them to have their voices
heard—and to help their livelihoods.
These efforts have scaled up in recent years as Zambrano involves
local farmers in the process. Local farmers are encouraged to farm with
traditional chinampas, or “floating gardens” constructed with
aquatic vegetation and mud from the lake, to create sanctuaries for the
axolotl. The productive and sustainable agricultural system does not use
chemical pesticides—they have even experimented with grinding up
invasive tilapia for fertilizer—and creates a semi-permeable barrier to
provide refuge for the axolotl with clean, filtered water.
“We are not discovering anything new that wasn’t discovered 2,000 years ago,” Zambrano explains. It may not be enough. “Despite all this work, there is no doubt
that the axolotl is in decline within the larger system,” says
Griffiths, pointing out that the threats to the lake system are simply
too great. Zambrano is hopeful. He has seen a steady increase in
interest in the axolotl, which he hopes to leverage into local
government action. The first step, he says, is to save Xochimilco.
In Julio Cortázar’s 1952 short story “Axolotl,” the
narrator writes that “the axolotls were like witnesses of something,
and at times like horrible judges,” before turning into one himself. If
history doesn’t change, experts warn, real life axolotls may witness is
their own demise.
“I think that we are in a threshold in this moment,” says
Zambrano. “But if we follow the path that we have followed for the last
50 years where the government is trying to rescue Xochimilco through
more human development, then [the axolotl] will definitely be extinct in
the next 10 years.”
When Léna Roy was 7 years old, her teacher read the first chapter of A Wrinkle in Time
aloud to her second-grade class. After school, Léna ran to her
grandmother’s house, which was around the corner from her school on the
Upper West Side of Manhattan, to finish the book on her own. She curled
up in bed and devoured it. She felt just like the hotheaded, stubborn
heroine Meg Murry, and took comfort in the fact that a flawed adolescent
girl could save the world. “It was almost like your permission to be a
real person,” Roy says. “You don’t have to be perfect.”
Millions of other adolescent girls (and boys) have made the same liberating discovery while reading A Wrinkle in Time.
What’s different about Roy is that her grandmother happened to be
Madeleine L’Engle, the book’s author, who revolutionized serious young
adult fiction with her clever mash-up of big ideas, science fantasy and
adventure—and a geeky girl action hero way ahead of her time. Since its 1962 publication, Wrinkle has sold more than ten
million copies and been turned into a graphic novel, an opera and two
films, including an ambitious adaptation from the director Ava DuVernay
due out in March. The book also kicked open the door for other bright
young heroines and the amazingly lucrative franchises they appear in,
from whip-smart Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter books to lethal Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games. Leonard Marcus, author of the L’Engle biography Listening for Madeleine, says Wrinkle
“set the stage for the reception of Harry Potter in this country.”
Previously, he says, science fiction and fantasy were suitable for
high-end British authors like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in Britain
but in the States were relegated to pulp magazines and drugstore
paperbacks.
Then came L’Engle, a 41-year-old writer who spent three months in 1959 writing the hard-to-categorize story that would become A Wrinkle in Time.
While Meg Murry and her companions traveled through time and space to
save her father, a scientist trapped by evil forces on a distant planet,
readers had to wrap their minds around the fifth dimension, the horrors
of conformity and the power of love. L’Engle believed that literature
should show youngsters they were capable of taking on the forces of evil
in the universe, not just the everyday pains of growing up. “If it’s
not good enough for adults,” she once wrote, “it’s not good enough for
children.”
Publishers hated it. Every firm her agent
turned to rejected the manuscript. One advised to “do a cutting job on
it—by half.” Another complained “it’s something between an adult and
juvenile novel.” Finally, a friend advised L’Engle to send it to one of
the most prestigious houses of all, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. John
Farrar liked the manuscript. A test reader he gave it to, though, was
unimpressed: “I think this is the worst book I have ever read, it
reminds me of TheWizard of Oz.” Yet FSG acquired it,
and Hal Vursell, the book’s editor, talked it up in letters he sent to
reviewers: “It’s distinctly odd, extremely well written,” he wrote to
one, “and is going to make greater intellectual and emotional demands on
12 to 16 year olds than most formula fiction for this age group.”
When it debuted, not only was Wrinkle widely praised—“wholly absorbing,” said the New York Times Book Review—but
it won the Newbery Medal, the most important award in children’s lit.
“The almost universal reaction of children to this year’s winning book,
by wanting to talk about it to each other and to elders, shows the deep
desire to understand as well as to enjoy,” said Newbery committee member
Ruth Gagliardo. American publishers, initially resistant to genre
bending, soon were producing their own teen epics, including Lloyd
Alexander’s Newbery-winning Chronicles of Prydain books and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series.
L’Engle went on to write more than 40 books, including works of nonfiction and poetry, though none was as acclaimed as Wrinkle.
None was as controversial, either. Libraries and schools frequently
banned the novel because of its entanglements with religion. In one
passage, Jesus Christ is compared to Shakespeare, Einstein and the
Buddha—a heretical notion to some authorities. On the American Library
Association’s list of most “frequently challenged” for the 1990s, Wrinkle was No. 23.
Among the countless girls changed forever by L’Engle’s book was
Diane Duane, who first read it as a 10-year-old in 1962. She’d consumed
all the science fiction and fantasy at her local library but had never
encountered anyone like Meg. “Finally,” Duane recalls, “here was a girl
character being treated as if her take on what was going on around her,
her analysis and her emotional reactions to the things that were
happening around her, were real and were worth paying attention to.”
Today Duane is hailed as the best-selling author of So You Want to Be a Wizard
and other titles in her Young Wizards fantasy series, which features a
young female protagonist, Nita. “All the time L’Engle’s shadow—and a
very bright shadow, it has to be said—was lying over that work for me,”
she says. “It would have been very difficult for me to do that writing
without thinking about her a lot.”
Léna Roy, who is a writing teacher in New York and the co-author of an upcoming biography of her grandmother, Becoming Madeleine,
doesn’t remember L’Engle ever calling herself a feminist, though she
was proud of being what Roy calls a “trailblazing woman.” L’Engle had
spent her years at Smith College editing the campus literary magazine
alongside Betty Friedan, who later penned The Feminine Mystique.
L’Engle herself suggested it was easy to make her protagonist a strong
girl. “I’m a female,” she once said. “Why would I give all the best
ideas to a male?”
Now the movie adaptation of Wrinkle is poised to make
L’Engle’s creation even more groundbreaking. DuVernay, the first woman
of color to direct a live-action film with a production budget over $100
million, intentionally cast nonwhite actors in lead roles. (Storm Reid
will play Meg, and Deric McCabe will play her younger brother Charles.)
In 1962, it was radical to see a young girl in charge. Now a new
generation of black girls (and boys) can see themselves onscreen and
dream of saving the world.
There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing
they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly
button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious”
inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called
Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a
Scratch Off World wall map.
They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second,
embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For
thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that
lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials
whose impacts will ramify for generations.
Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered
that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1%
remain in use six months after sale(1).
Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned
to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or
perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).
But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot
become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no
utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth
Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer
can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote
control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use
them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. They are designed to
elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.
The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the
impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for
manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into
compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil
fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and
consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide
production(2). We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.
People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility(3).
Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese
board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is
pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective
madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we
scarcely notice what has happened to us.
In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by
poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot(4).
No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in
Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting
it like cocaine to display their wealth. It’s grotesque, but it scarcely
differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing:
trashing the living world through pointless consumption.
This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled
and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries
to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes,
deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending.
But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on
what?”. When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those
who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly
useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are
harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our
doors.
Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing
this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit
my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet.
“Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5).
An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son
camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special
features(6). The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you.
The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom
ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the
US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top
1% of the population(7).
The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply
does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who
already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of
everyone else who will live on this earth are diminished.
So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated
consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is
to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness last week’s Moral
Maze programme, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea
of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism(8). When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics.
Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a
joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you
care. All it shows is that you don’t.
/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/0e/7a/0e7a1cb2-9585-48d6-aae3-6785498943f2/b8c6tt.jpg)
Axolotls are richly represented in captivity. These two, at the
Vancouver Aquarium, are leucistic, meaning they have less pigmentation
than normal. 
