‘It Had Teeth’: A 3-Year-Old Discovers Ancient Treasure in Israel
While on a hike with her family, a child stumbled across a 3,800-year-old Egyptian amulet. It will go on display in an upcoming exhibition.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/world/middleeast/child-an...
From the article it doesn't appear they've ever been found alive in the wild anywhere but their natural habitat. This was likely a remarkable chance happening where an owner released one and she found it within close succession or else it likely would have died very quickly.
If there is a wild population, that would be an even more amazing story.
I did think it was strange they didn't spell that out though. Maybe they thought 'Mexican' makes it clear, but it reads too easily like a species name.
It is absolutely an abandoned pet. They cannot survive outside the tropics. Hell, they can't even survive outside the 2 lakes in Mexico City that they're hyperadapted to
There are less than 1,000 of them in the wild. Trust me if it was possible to establish a population somewhere else outside of captivity, scientists and conservationists would already be on it
That. Or the family fabricated the story for online fame.
Not saying that i have any evidence either way. Fundamentaly it is an unverifiable feel-good story with great online “viral” potential. It might be a very lucky axolotl who got abandoned, found and re-captured in the short window it could survive in the wild. It can also be a viral content strategy capturing eyeballs. In my, admitedly very jaded, guestimate I would give the two options about equal chances.
An axolotl is a salamander that has evolved neoteny (imagine a frog staying as a tadpole its whole life). It's also specifically adapted to a specific lake system in Mexico City. If it is kept in water under 57°F (14°C) it will die in a few days. They are also extremely sensitive to changes in the water quality or chemistry. It's not clear that this one will even survive after being rescued
There aren’t many baby salamanders that size, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_giant_salamander#Breed... says “external gills remain until a length of about 20 cm (8 in) at an age of 3 years”, so it could be. I wouldn’t know whether these look similar, though.
Examples in the wild are - bar the possibility of an albino example - all dark skinned. The pink/light skinned ones are the results of mutations and ultimately selective breeding in the pet population.
So is it likely this one merely escaped? I find it hard to believe someone who would own one of these would not be an enthusiast, and that enthusiasts wouldn't find another owner for a critically endangered species rather than merely drop it under a local bridge.
No it is extremely unlikely this is an "escape". This would be lucky to survive for a week in Europe. Almost certainly what happened is someone bought one and then realized they are too complicated to take care of and decided to dump it in a spot they thought looked pretty
Also there are 1,000 of these in the wild but there are over a million of them in captivity. You can get a typical morph for about $50.
It's this, for sure. An axolotl is not going to live in the wild. I own a home near a public pond. There are pretty much always fancy goldfish swimming in it during the time of the year that everyone moves out. People just decide not to keep their fish.
1000 wild ones. There's much more in captivity than in the wild.
They evolved to be quite dependent on the unique agricultural islands in the Valley of Mexico called Chinampas. These were drained by the colonizers. Which is why Mexico City is now facing a severe water crisis and also why these creatures are endangered
Yup. A lake that used to fuel the single most productive agricultural system humans have ever practiced. It's sad but there is a strong indigenous movement to bring them back. The axolotl actually became a major symbol of indigenous resistance because of this movement
> the single most productive agricultural system humans have ever practiced
This is simply not true. The highiest maize yield per hectare I can find anywhere online for chinampas is less than half the 13.5 metric tons per hectare that farmers get in Iowa. The more reputable numbers are less than 1/4 of that. It's probably true that they were among the most productive pre-modern agricultural plots which is a great achievement, but there's no need to make things up.
They produce a lot more than just corn. Not only can they be farmed for hundreds of years without break, but they can be harvested 4 to 7 times per year. They are 13 times as productive per unit of area as conventional dry-land farming.
> In Xochimilco, roughly 750 hectares of active chinampas produce around 80 tons of vegetables daily. This translates to a massive, continuous, year-round output of over 38,000 tons per year across the entire area
So that translates to 50.7 metric tons per hectre.
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> the most productive pre-modern agricultural plots which is a great achievement, but there's no need to make things up
Post-industrial agriculture is not actually more productive per area. It's just more productive per input labor.
> Agricultural yields within the most densely populated and productive preindustrial land-use systems compared well with modern yields and were sustained in some regions for centuries to millennia, even though they also tended to require extreme inputs of labor and other socially unsustainable hardships
How much fertilizer does the Iowan farmer need to add to their field to achieve that? How many years can they maintain that yield without eroding the soil?
Thanks to the author and HN - it was posted here sometime ago, and being that impressive it naturally stuck in my memory like i'm sure now it will in yours :)
Contrary to the report, they are actually not difficult to keep as pets - they are just highly sensitive to pollutants in the water.
The unfortunate case for the wild population, is that they naturally inhabit a location which today has one of the highest human population densities in the world, and hence massive pressure on water resources. We could probably quite easily re-establish a breeding population in remote areas in Europe but would constitute an invasive species and hence wouldn't happen.
As a species, they are not endangered due to their very large populations now in the pet trade (though these then get inbred, become domesticated etc).
Axolotls have also been used for over 200 years for medical research related to regenerative biology. They’re unique among vertebrates in that they can regenerate nearly every part of their body, even parts of their brain. https://orip.nih.gov/about-orip/research-highlights/amazing-...
I have three axolotl's in the next room, there are no subspecies to my knowledge, except maybe for some cross breeding with Salamanders in the US.
They are common in scientific research as they have amazing regenerative abilities; they will often mistakenly bite each other's legs off as juveniles (they are not the smartest creatures) and then grow them back in a few weeks, good as new. They made it into the exotic pet trade and now they are quite common in captivity, but now critically endangered in the wild. There are attempts to breed and repopulate them, with some limited success.
Another interesting thing, in many countries and states it is legal to keep an axolotl and illegal to keep a Salamander.
They are actually fairly easy to keep in my experience, with two caveats. 1) you need to be able to keep the water below 24 Deg C, this means spending some money on chillers even in sub-tropical countries. 2) If you have a pair in the same tank (regardless of sexing) you need to be prepared to cull the eggs! (freeze them) Prices here went from ~$50NZ each down to around $10-15 each due to the Minecraft craze.
They're either an invasive species, and therefore should not be introduced to the area (and you know that many pets will be introduced once the novelty wears off). Or they're native to the area, and should be left alone because they're endangered or otherwise threatened.
Those are just two reasons, but I'd bet they cover a lot of cases.
Often Axolotls have been "grandfathered" into the legal exotic pet trade, and salamanders have not and they tend to be considered separate species, even though biologically it's a very blurry line. Also, it often happens in areas where there is a local wild salamander population that is being protected from poaching.
You likely don't have wild axolotls nearby so if a pet escapes it'll just die and not affect the ecosystem. OTOH, an escaped salamander might thrive and displace wild salamanders and disrupt the ecosystem. Or carry a disease, or ...
most places ban exotic pets that are able to survive in the local climate to prevent invasive species from outcompeting the local feral cat population.
my understanding is that thr light skinned / pink variants are the results of mutation and selective breeding - and obviously racism, light skinned being considered more cute - in the pet population and almost all examples in the wild are dark skinned.
It's a similar story for Venus fly trap plants. It has a tiny habitat so it's exotic. They're easy to breed so it's cheap to start selling them. But their limited habitat is being destroyed, so they are endangered and also on the clearance rack at the garden store.
Why not. We found plenty of endagered species at zoos. They are endangered not only as a function of the number of species, but due to their vanishing environments.
It's a very strange definition. Would you consider domestic chickens "endangered"? Clearly if there are many kept in captivity and bred, there's little chance of them becoming extinct even if there are nearly none in the wild.
Yeah, I didn't want to spoil the article with my comment, it was a good read, but it did immediately make sense why they were so popular now. I've met multiple people in passing who own Axolotl. I used to think I was super special that I met a guy who owned one, and I assumed it was because he was a famous neuroscientist, and had some special permission, but now they're relatively common as pets (to a degree).
Unfortunately, the whole Minecraft thing caused a lot of people to buy them with little understanding of proper care, so I suspect there's some "that's cool but please don't rush in unprepared" in the hard to keep message. There are also some misconceptions around water quality requirements, they really don't like chemical pollutants, but I have no issues with local municipal water, other areas could have issues and require RO water, etc. but there are plenty of tropical fish keepers in this same situation.
And then there's the water temp thing, that caught me off-guard and I was using frozen water bottles for a few weeks until my chiller arrived, if the tank had been located in a different part of the house it might have been required.
From another comment here: "you need to be able to keep the water below 24 Deg C, this means spending some money on chillers even in sub-tropical countries"
I think people anticipate needing heaters for certain types of fish, but I'd never have expected to buy a cooling unit for aquatic life.
Yeah, adding in a chiller makes things way more complicated than just adding a resistive heater. A decent looking chiller for an aquarium is ~$1,000, plus you need temp sensors and control wiring to maintain the setpoint properly, and then you need to pray the electricity doesn’t go out. A 1/3rd HP chiller draws around 1kW including the circ pump
An aquarium backup battery for a simple pump is like $50 for something that'll last a few hours of outage, but for a chiller with that kind of draw, it's a bit more expensive.
Not its natural habitat - it would probably die in winter
Axolotls are somewhat popular as pets so I’m thinking someone got rid of theirs by tossing it in the river and the girl just happened to find it afterwards.
Far more plausible explanation than “found in the wild 9000km and an ocean away from its place of origin”
People are telling you it would die in the winter but the truth is it would die in a week. This pet was surely abandoned in the past 48 hours and that's why this is so rare.
They are hyper adapted to the water cycles, nutrient profile, and pH levels of the Xochimilco lake system in Mexico city and were taken care of by indigenous people for thousands of years. They have never survived anywhere outside of these lakes
They used to live in some others areas too. I once visited some places in the sierras close to Queretaro and while we were walking along the river a local guide told me he hasn't seen one in a decade but he used to see them regularly when he was a teenager.
Having said that there are surely a lot of factors that would make its survival impossible in wales given how hard it is for them to survive in their original ecosystems.
Yes there were more than one specy, somewhere between 15 and 20. I don't know tge names of them all and the one most emblematic of xochimilco may very well be limited to this area but that doesn't mean the other species do not count, especially if they were all called axolotl by the indigenous population.
I see. Yeah there are 32 species in the same family and they almost all look like an axolotl before they undergo metamorphosis. The unique thing about axolotls is they are the only salamander species in the world that doesn't undergo metamorphosis (this is called neoteny). It'd be like if a frog just stayed as a tadpole its whole life.
1. The article already mentions the parents of the girl who caught it are looking into how to best keep an axolotl and a bigger tank has already arrived.
2. Axolotls can't survive in a Welsh climate. This creature will live much longer as a pet than it would in the wild.
It's against the law for it to be in the wild. And the temperature range in which it can survive is quite narrow, it would probably die sometime this year if left alone.
As mentioned in the article, this was almost certainly someone's pet and dumped in the river when they couldn't take care of it anymore. Axolotls are endemic to Mexico.
Wales is a lot smaller than the continental United States. What do you expect them to say? "Cardiff is part of Wales, unceded territory of the Welsh"? That would be entirely performative. If you feel strongly about this topic, you ought to demand more meaningful steps, such as the use of Welsh language place names.
"We inhabitants of Dry Land must acknowledge that we all descended from these superior beings of Water Worlds. All the salt water in our veins is a debt and homage to the Water Beings from whom we stole it. We Dry Landers will forever devote ourselves to lifting up on a pedestal, these Water Beings, as long as that pedestal is submerged deep underwater. We solemnly pledge and promise the payment of reparations, in the form of Sea Monkeys for breakfast."
That one is ancient history. My 6yo is currently fighting
her friends and their parents alike to make them realize and learn that there is an "L" at the end - it's "axolotl", not "axolot".
It's technically not just “an L” if we're trying to avoid Anglicizing the pronunciation, right? The “tl” cluster is its own affricate with a lateral fricative as its tail, or am I misremembering?
What is scientific about this pronunciation? Axolotl is not the scientfic name (its Ambystoma mexicanum), and usually the goal with pronouncing scientific names is for the listener to be able to spell the name after hearing it (at least for botany, which is what I am familiar with).
In the Spanish of the 1490s and early 1500s, there was a "SH" sound, spelled with X, the same way there is today in other Iberian languages like Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, or Basque. They got to Mexico and wrote many indigenous words with "SH" sounds (like "Mexico" and "axolotl") with X. Shortly after this, the pronunciation shifted to the modern Spanish J sound (which in much of the Spanish speaking world is like the CH in loch, but in some countries is like an H sound).
I am Spanish myself and didn't know about this fact until recently. It explains many "old-fashioned" spellings like México, Pedro Ximenez, or Don Quixote (nowadays usually written as Quijote, but you will find the old spelling in other languages).
For those who are curious enough, this article explains the evolution of the Spanish sibilants and why our languages uses J and Z in a very different way from pretty much any other language:
My favorite example: It also explains why "sherry" wine comes from "Jerez" ... Because it used to be Xerez at the time that most European languages learned the name.
Well, actually I suppose the hardest part is to pronounce the other consonant hispanicized as -tl at the end (a soft lisp)
[ɬ]
voiceless
alveolar
lateral
fricative
[0]
in a sufficient fluent manner (except you happen to speak e.g. Welsh, there the sound is written as ll so by happenstance the "axolotl" found in Wales can be pronounced fluently by the Welsh) otherwise you are saying it half correct which is arguably worse.
So let the nahuatl speaking people have a laugh at your expense for pronouncing it the germanic way or if you want to go unnoticed do it the evolved spanish romanic way, a good middle ground I guess.
Anyway I think it is generally a lot fun to hear words pronounced "wrong" by foreigners or having trouble hearing/pronouncing it "right" respectively heavy accents are hilarious icebreakers (:
The Welsh or Icelandic "ll" is not quite the same. That's a "voiceless lateral fricative", lacking the alveolar break that earned it the "t" in "tl" for the Latinized spelling. It's much closer than most languages get, but it is a different sound.
The Nahuatl consonant is a "voiceless alveolar lateral affricate". It is a single constant represented with [tɬ] or, more correctly, with a tie bar between those two glyphs: [t͡ɬ].
They can spell/pronounce things differently than we do and it's all cool either way. It's very common for animals to have different spellings, pronunciations, or even completely different names between languages. If you add time and regional axes, the same variances can be true even when keeping with the same language!
I'm just explaining why it's written 'x' and pronounced [ʃ]. If it pleases people to knowingly mispronounce Nahuatl loan words, they can do so, but it seems rather silly given that [ʃ] is also in the phonemic inventory of English. What next? Are you going say 'fowks pass' for faux pas?
Where I disagree is the premise it's supposed to be mispronunciation to say/spell a word differently than where it came from, doubly so when we change the spellings/pronunciations of our own words!
I think the disconnect here is that I actually wasn't aware that 'axolotl' existed as an established word in English. If you're looking at it just as a Nahuatl word written using Nahuatl orthographic conventions, then it's weird for someone to suggest that it should be written with a 'sh' because that's how it's pronounced.
What I meant is that it would be weird for an English speaker to have views on how Nahuatl words should be written using Nahuatl orthography, since different languages obviously have different orthographic conventions and associate different symbols with different sounds.
Oh, got ya - I thought they were talking about how English writes/pronounces its version of the word rather than how Nahuatl should do so! I agree fully in that case, it wouldn't make any sense at all for how foreign languages do something to dictate how another does - or to even expect them to be the same.
It does.. and I've never heard anyone say it that way (and I appreciate that you chose the only dictionary that gave anything close to your argument).. but that's still nothing like "ballot".
That is how Mexico used to be pronounced in Old Spanish. Kind of like how X is sometimes pronounced "sh" in Portuguese. The name was based on an indigenous name which had the "sh" sound there.
Is there a word for foreign loan words that have their pronounciation changed?
I feel like axolotl fits in that category as it’s a commonly known animal in the English speaking world, that has a common pronounciation remarkedly different from the language it came from.
Loan words going from English -> Asian languages like Thai and Japanese such as “beer” becoming “beeru” fit the same vein.
That’s like telling the Japanese that “cutlet” is not pronounced “katsu.” It ain’t gonna change. Or even having southerners pronounce squirrel with two sellable [autocorrect : syllables] Good luck with that!
At twelve cents for a half tail or twenty five cents for a full tail, I think I'll stick to just watching them climb trees and bury nuts. Especially since I'm expected to salt, straighten, and dry the tails first.
We're speaking English, so why even entertain the idea of pronouncing "axolotl" differently, in that case? The Japanese say "en", but that doesn't seem to inspire anyone else not to say "yen".
That's because in English we get it via Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century). If we're going from Nahuatl direct to English, and the Nahuatl sound also exists in English, then you may as well just use the correct sound. Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
The misconception is that words enter "a language" and not individual people's minds. Most English speakers have never heard the word "axolotl" spoken in its original pronunciation, nor are they familiar with the orthography that spells a "sh" with X.
>Spanish, which doesn't have ʃ (although interestingly, it was just in the process of losing that sound in the early 17th century).
I don't know about 17th century, but some dialects of Spanish certainly do have that sound now.
>Otherwise, what are you going to do with Xochimilco?
In English, X at the start of a word is typically pronounced like a Z, as in "Xanadu", "Xanax", and "xylophone". I don't think anyone would bat an eye if you read it as "Zochimilco".
Are you sure that x is an ecks and not a chi that straightened up a bit?
The thing about script and type is they only really work by prior agreement.
There is a set of marks on the page that we all agree on "is" an axolotl. How we choose to say that out loud is up to the individual. On the other hand, if we were to converse with you directly ... vocally ... then you could tell us how you say the name and if we were convinced that you were at least Mexican, we might follow your lead.
Script, type and sounds rarely match up precisely, ever.
I live in a town called Yeovil (Somerset, UK). I have a mug with at least 65 different spellings of the name over the last ~1900 odd years. It started off as Gifle "bend in the river" in a Saxon language. We have had a "great vowel shift" in "english" and three different varieties of "english" noted since then, just in these parts, let alone elsewhere.
The place name was spelt as Evil or Euil for a while! No-one batted an eyelid because the concept of the grammar nazi was a long way in the future and spelling was pretty random in general. Ivel, Ivol, Givelle and many more have been documented.
Please record how you say the name and make it available. Fiddling with text will never cut it.
They are unique to like 2 lakes in Mexico. This is someone's pet that they dumped there. It would not have survived more than a week in Wales had it not been found.
Well it's native to the Xochimilco "lake system". Sometimes its hard to say what's a different lake or not but it's the same system of lakes. They also used to be in Lake Chalco which at certain times of the year could connect into the same lake as Xochimilco. Regardless, it's always been a tiny range
My understanding is they were in other mountainous areas as well in central Mexico but their habitat was much more reduced there so they went extinct even faster.
A. Velasci is definitely endangered in its natural habitats and it was also called Axolotl in nahuatl.
I don't think it is interesting to argue if there is one axolotl that is more important than the others, even if the one from Xochimilco has the particularity of staying in its larval state.
I'm not arguing one is more important than the other but only one of them is critically endangered and only one of them is a powerful cultural indigenous symbol.
Ambystoma velasci is also an "actual" salamander. The unique thing about the axolotl is that it never goes to the stage where it leaves the water. It is the only salamander species known to do this.
I think it likely speaks to how much more common they are as exotic pets than they have been in the past. That she found it before it died is surprising, and the longer I think about this story the longer I wonder if they just bought it as a pet and the river discovery was a gag for online clout.
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‘It Had Teeth’: A 3-Year-Old Discovers Ancient Treasure in Israel While on a hike with her family, a child stumbled across a 3,800-year-old Egyptian amulet. It will go on display in an upcoming exhibition. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/world/middleeast/child-an...
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