Mexico City’s endangered axolotl has found fame—is that enough to save it?

In Mexico City’s trendy Roma neighbourhood, Monstruo de Agua’s patio hums with young people chatting over smoked avocado ceviche, tempura mushrooms, and craft beers. Each beer at the microbrewery bears a label with an image of the quirky axolotl, complete with its crown of feather-like gills.

The brewery chose the critically endangered salamander as its mascot in the hopes of boosting awareness among the Mexican public, says founder Matías Vera-Cruz Dutrenit. “If our product is good, it can act as a good ambassador to the animal,” he says.

Named after the Aztec god of fire and lightning, Xolotl, the axolotl has been an important symbol of Mexican culture for centuries. Monstruo del Agua means “water monster,” which is the Spanish translation of the word axolotl from Nahuatl, the language of the ancient Aztecs.

Once widespread throughout the high-altitude lakes surrounding Mexico City, these foot-long amphibians are now limited to only a few inland canals near Lake Xochimilco, where only between 50 and a thousand survive. This precariously small population faces a barrage of threats: water pollution; predation by invasive carp and tilapia; and most significantly, habitat loss.

As the salamander has declined over the past decade, public awareness about the axolotl has blossomed. Axolotls are now characters in the online game Minecraft and on the global game platform Roblox. The new 50 peso, released in late 2021, features the axolotl as its cover model. 

Axolotls—normally brown or grey in the wild—have also become extremely popular as pets, which are usually white with pink highlights, a genetic mutation caused by captive breeding. (Read how Mexican nuns are working to help axolotls.)

Despite the widespread recognition, Luis Zambrano, an axolotl expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is skeptical about whether the new bill or the axolotl’s growing fame will translate into meaningful change. 

“We have millions of [captive] axolotls around the world,” Zambrano says, but “we need the habitat”—a daunting task in a sprawling metropolis of 22 million, he says.

There’s “not a silver bullet for the conservation of this species.”

Brewing awareness for the axolotl

Monstruo de Agua serves about 300 direct vendors, and in 2020, started exporting to stores in the United States.

Using the axolotl imagery on his company’s label comes with a moral obligation, says Dutrenit, who was born in Mexico City. For one, the company provides press kits to its beer vendors with basic information about axolotls and how to protect them.

As he samples some hummus from his menu one December afternoon, Dutrenit talks passionately about the parallels between axolotls and his company’s values: Mexican heritage, regeneration, and sustainability. 

The salamander can regrow lost or damaged limbs, hearts, spinal cords, and even parts of their brains. Likewise, Dutrenit says, his company uses regenerative farming practices for its native ingredients, such as agave and amaranth. This includes using polyculture—or growing more than one crop at a time, a practice that improves soil quality.

Lastly, the company is committed to sustainability. This includes using rainwater in beer production and transporting goods by bicycle, all meant to lessen the human impact on Mexico City’s environment, including the axolotl’s Xochimilco habitat.

Habitat restoration: crucial but challenging 

In 1993, the Mexican government took action to protect axolotl habitat by designating the 530-acre Xochimilco Ecological Park and Plant Market. But progress has been slow: Pollution from wastewater treatment plants and urbanisation still threaten much of the area, Zambrano says.

That’s why Zambrano and his colleagues developed a Plan B for axolotls, establishing temporary ponds for captive salamanders. In a recent experiment, 11 pairs of lab-bred axolotls were released, one at a time, into three ponds on the university campus. The results were encouraging: Seven of the 11 pairs hatched eggs, and the surviving juveniles were healthy. 

So far, these captive axolotls serve as an insurance population: Zambrano said scientists won’t release them into Xochimilco unless the wild population completely disappears. 

Traditional farming saves salamanders

Xochimilco native and community organiser Dionisio Eslava Sandoval is taking matters into his own hands by restoring traditional pre-Hispanic chinampas, artificial agricultural islands surrounded by narrow canals that filter out pollution.

Chinampas provide perfect habitat for axolotls, but 95 percent of them are unproductive, either overgrown or abandoned as traditional farming has ebbed.

Most outsiders know Xochimilco for its colourfully painted party boats called trajineras, which take tourists on cruises through the area’s canal system. But on this clear morning, our personal trajinera captain has a different mission. He steers his boat past a Xochimilco sign featuring a bright pink smiling axolotl and stops at Sandoval’s newly restored chinampa.

As Sandoval disembarks, he recalls how far his chinampa has come; once a “tremendous garbage dump,” it’s now a thriving farm of about 2,000 square feet, producing carrots, garlic, broccoli, and other crops grown with native seeds and organic farming methods.

Sandoval’s chinampa is also the new home to 11 axolotls, which Sandoval—with a government permit—relocated from the main canal system into interconnected ditches, where two screen-like filters keep out heavy metals and other pollutants, as well as carp and tilapia. Landowners and farmers in similar ditches nearby have released at least 240 more axolotls using this method.

Though he does not work directly with Sandoval, Zambrano and his team manage the Chinampa Refuge Project, which created 20 similar axolotl refuges with the help of 28 local chinampa farmers, also by relocating animals from the main canals.

Sandoval hopes even more people will follow suit. “The idea is that this grows,” he said. “How do we educate people? With an example.”