Do axolotls make good pets?

I've written this article before.

Years ago, while working in livestock retail, I wrote dozens of articles intended to provide customers with information about the animals we sold and the care that comes with them. Fifty-eight of them, in fact.

Only six were ever published. All still remain intellectual property of the company.

This one was probably the best of them.

And it's crap.

Fast forward to now and I want another go.

ARE AXOLOTLS GOOD PETS?

The original

I originally had the delightful job of writing a generic care-sheet-style article: what you buy for them, why you should buy that stuff from the shop, with a bit of natural history thrown in for good measure.

The actual animal is far more fascinating.

Its future is considerably more bleak.

The actual animal

Axolotls (Ambystoma mexicanum) are fully aquatic salamanders, closely related to tiger salamanders and found naturally in the southern region of Mexico City.

But they are not exactly conventional salamanders.

Axolotls belong to a rather elite group of amphibians that reach adulthood without undergoing the complete metamorphosis we normally associate with amphibian development. They retain their aquatic, larval characteristics into adulthood and, importantly, are perfectly capable of reproducing in this state.

Then there is the regeneration.

And this is where axolotls become properly ridiculous.

Losing a limb is not necessarily the permanent inconvenience you might expect it to be. Axolotls are capable of regenerating limbs and tails, but their abilities extend considerably further than that. They can regenerate tissues associated with the heart and eyes, parts of the central nervous system and even portions of the brain.

Unsurprisingly, humans noticed.

Their regenerative capabilities have been studied for more than 150 years, and axolotls became established as a model organism — an animal extensively studied by scientists to investigate biological processes with the hope that what we learn from them can improve our understanding of biology elsewhere.

Our relationship with them, however, goes back considerably further than the laboratory.

Axolotls have historically been used as a food source, stretching from the time of the Aztecs through to relatively modern Mexican markets. Their natural range was once considerably larger too, extending throughout lakes and wetlands across the Mexican Central Valley.

Today that wild range has contracted dramatically.

The remaining native habitat centres around Lake Xochimilco and its network of wetlands and canals, surrounded by the expansion of Mexico City. This landscape has itself been shaped by people for more than a thousand years.

The Xochimilca developed an agricultural system of artificial islands known as chinampas. These islands, separated by drainage canals and still worked by chinamperos today, created habitat and hiding places in which axolotls historically thrived.

And then things changed.

Urban expansion reduced their available habitat, while introduced Asian carp and African tilapia brought additional pressures through competition for food and predation upon axolotl eggs and young.

Which leaves us with one of the strangest contradictions surrounding this animal.

Axolotls are bred throughout the world. They live in laboratories. They live in our homes. They have become instantly recognisable animals.

And yet the animal all of those captive axolotls came from is struggling to survive in the place where it actually belongs.

International superstardom

The axolotl is possibly the single most recognisable salamander on the face of the planet.

The 50-peso note.
Minecraft.
Fortnite.
Pokémon characters inspired by them.
Even How to Train Your Dragon has drawn comparisons.

Then there is science. Axolotls have one of the longest histories of any laboratory model organism, with animals first taken to Europe for scientific study in the nineteenth century.

We have turned this little Mexican salamander into an international superstar.

So how has this iconic amphibian become critically endangered in the wild, with its remaining natural population reduced to fragments of its former range?

While precise numbers are impossible to establish, captive axolotls are thought to number well into the hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions.

Read those statements again.

A fragment in the wild.
Potentially more than a million in captivity.

If those figures are even approximately correct, then we have achieved something extraordinary.

We have made the axolotl enormously successful.

Just not as an axolotl.

Because a million captive animals do not replace a wild population. They don't replace Xochimilco. They don't replace the chinampas, the waterways, the prey, predators, competition, selection pressures or thousands of years of evolutionary history that created Ambystoma mexicanum in the first place.

And perhaps that's where asking whether axolotls make good pets starts becoming a much more interesting question.

We've become incredibly good at owning axolotls.

Have we become equally good at understanding them?

So, do they make good pets?

Popular culture has produced this weird situation where millions of people know what an axolotl looks like, but relatively few know what an axolotl is.

Minecraft gives you a cute aquatic mob. Social media gives you the smiling pink face. Pet retail gives you the tank, filter, food and water conditioner.

Natural history gives you something considerably more complicated.

Axolotls are fully aquatic amphibians. They aren't animals that you take out of their enclosure for handling. They aren't particularly active in the way many people expect a pet to be, and much of the work involved in keeping one isn't actually about looking after the axolotl directly.

It's about looking after the water.

That was something my original article actually got right.

Axolotls naturally inhabit a large aquatic environment where water chemistry is relatively stable. Put one into an aquarium and suddenly we become responsible for maintaining that stability. Filtration, temperature, waste, ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, oxygenation and regular testing become part of keeping the animal whether the new owner finds water chemistry interesting or not.

And axolotls aren't exactly considerate house guests.

They're carnivores. They consume worms, insects, crustaceans, small aquatic prey and other suitably sized foods by rapidly opening the mouth and creating suction, drawing both prey and water inside. What goes in must eventually come back out, and a reasonably large carnivorous amphibian can place a considerable biological load on an enclosed body of water.

The smiling pink salamander has become a wastewater-management project.

Not quite as adorable when Minecraft puts it like that.

Then there is interaction.

Axolotls can be fascinating animals to observe, but they're not conventional handling pets. Their value as captive animals comes from watching them feed, move around their environment and simply being axolotls rather than taking them out for physical interaction.

That matters when somebody asks whether they make a good pet for a child.

My original answer was simply no.

I don't think I'd answer it quite so simply anymore.

A child fascinated by aquatic biology, supported by an adult who understands that they ultimately carry responsibility for maintaining the aquarium, may find an axolotl absolutely captivating.

A child who wants one because they found one in Minecraft is an entirely different proposition.

And perhaps that's the problem with asking whether axolotls make good pets.

Good for whom?

For somebody who enjoys maintaining aquatic systems, is prepared to monitor water quality and temperature, doesn't expect to handle their animal and finds observing natural behaviour rewarding?

Potentially.

For somebody wanting a low-maintenance pink salamander that smiles at them from a tank?

Probably not.

The animal hasn't changed.

Our expectations have.

The wrong question

The first time I wrote this article, I tried to answer whether axolotls made good pets by explaining what tank to buy, how often to change the water and what to feed them.

None of that information was useless.

But it answered the wrong question.

Keeping an animal isn't simply a matter of assembling the correct equipment around it. It's understanding what that animal is, where it came from, what its biology requires and whether the life we can provide actually fits those requirements.

Years later, I still think axolotls can make fascinating captive animals.

I just don't think that's the same thing as saying they make good pets.

Perhaps the better question isn't whether axolotls make good pets.

It's whether we're prepared to become good axolotl keepers.