#herpetological shapeshifter

[acamaryseinteery]

Meet Rio.

He's a Herpetological shapeshifter - meaning he can out of all animals shapeshift only into lizards and amphibians.

After many months since the wall broke and people began to spread their explorations and supply searches, far in more tropical lands the rumours of brave knights and hero shapeshifter that saved everyone reach to a creature, who would like to meet this shapeshifter to see that he's not alone.

After crawling in a tiny gecko form on one of the supply boxes, he makes it into the city and disguised as a frog he searches for the brave knights who could lead him to the said shapeshifter. And upon hearing who is the bravest of them all, he follows this said Ambrosius and appears in his flat, asking him to take him to their hero.

Once meeting Nimona it's a great shock for everyone that there are more like them and Nimona is all but happy that she isn't alone anymore.

A few things about him:

Pronounce: He/him

Sexuality: Demi romantic ace gay

Lives with Ambrosius who is trying to be a good influence on him, make him feel welcomed and wants to proof him that their kind are more than bunch of judgemental jerks. He also knows that with Nimona he would cause chaos and he doesn't want to let that happen. He also reminds him of little Bal who is happy that his boyfriend wants to try what it's like to be in his skin.

He loves: chips, popcorn, steaks, crickets, noodles and pancakes.

He's terrified of water because in his human form he can't swim and of sharp and pointy objects after his experience with people attacking him and giving him the eye scar. He's also thanks this terrified of needles.

He hates when animals are bullied, loves to scare humans and visit outdoor ponds and forests to reconnect with his natural and freedom offering habitat. Even though seeing an alligator swim around others is scary, being accompanied by shark is even scarier combination. But they make a great fish catchers.

He loves rock'n'roll music and despite everything that Ambrosius is trying to teach him to live by his own rules.

It takes a few weeks, few arrests and some trust building but he manages to feel less threatened and more relaxed around humanity that he takes on more comfortable form inspired by Ambrosius.

Now Nimona can't tease him about being her baby brother and Rio enjoys his more him form.

He likes to visit library to read more about lizards and amphibians and he goes to cinema just to buy a popcorn for a snack without even going to see a movie.

He likes to visit zoo to hang out with his animal pals and to prevent that the animals will be mistreated. He also is very good sprayer but there and there gets caught and is forced to wash it. Ambrosius and Bal's orders unless they proclaim the sprayed wall being an exception.

That's all about Rio, if you have any questions feel free to send an ask, please don't steal him and etc, just classic stuff. 😉

[sock-ness-monster]

Currently on a 10-hour van ride back from a Herpetology Research Trip and I played my advisor the episode of the magnus archives with the anatomy class for shapeshifters he loved it a lot

[shadowron]

Magic over Bourbon Street: New Manipulation Spells for Shadowrun (1st Edition). Part 2.

Part 1 here.

Let’s wrap up these Manipulation spells and move onto the next article, n’est-ce pas?

Body Rot

Is it OP? It might be OP. See, I’m keeping up the whippersnapper slang.

Let’s compare it with other S2 drain, sustained mana spells.

Chaos: Subject gets +2 TN per extra success due to distractions. Affects one target.

Stink: Subject gets +1 TN per extra success due to, well, stink. Area effect.

Body Rot: Subject gets +1 TN per round the spell is sustained, “after ten round the target collapses into a heap of stinking, rotted putrescence and stays that way until the spell is dropped.” Affects one target.

That the subject returns to normal after the spell is dropped is the best part – just like using Turn to Goo (drain S4).

Cobra Arms

Literally.

Episode 48

Not content with just having snake arms, how about a snake body:

Damballah’s Child

Shapeshifts the caster into a King Cobra. Can still cast spells. Useful for shadowruns where being a four-meter-long snake isn’t conspicuous.

Herpetology corner!      The King Cobra, while venomous, is native to southern and southeast Asia, which is…

Geography corner!          …nowhere near New Orleans.

Little Death

A version of Hibernate that can be used on unwilling targets. If you thought that, given the French influence in New Orleans, that this might refer to la petite mort, the post-orgasmic sensation likened to death, then you are like me.

Spider’s Nest

Remember the spell Full Stomach where the targets stomach fills with spiders and all they can do is vomit them up? This spell creates a pimple that bursts and expels 6D6 spiders. Honestly surprised we didn’t see more spells in this vein. 

Spider Sweat. 

Spider Urine. 

Spidarrhea.

(I’m so, so sorry for that phrase)

Tears of Blood 

Subject gets +4 TN due to looking like a magic card.

Tentacles

Guess what this does. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Is it this?

Or this?

It’s this!

They can stretch to [Body] ft in length, and can combine their individual strength (of 1) with others. Time to become polydactyl!

Venom Spew

Allows the caster to spit acidic venom, sort of like a spitting cobra. Lots of snake themes here.

Herpetology corner!      Shouldn’t that be a poison, not a venom? Venoms must be injected, whereas a substance interacting across a surface would be classified as a poison.

Herpetology corner corner!        No! The toxin delivered by spitting cobras can be done via injection – as a venom – but also by an active and direct physical delivery, known as a toxungen.  Poisons involve a passive transfer (ingestion, inhalation, absorption) of the toxin. But note that the venom of spitting cobras isn’t acidic, just toxic.

Herpetology corner!      So, there aren’t animals that spit acid?

Entomology corner!        There sure are! Fire ants (formic acid)! Whip scorpions (acetic acid)!

*casts little death to end this post*

[eucroft]

⟨ DANIELLE ROSE RUSSELL. CIS FEMALE. SHE/HER. ⟩ though the mist might prevent some from seeing it, ADELAIDE CROFT is actually a descendent of H Y P N O S. it’s still a question of whether or not the TWENTY-TWO year old CREATIVE WRITING MAJOR from SALEM, USA has taken after their godly parent completely, but the demigod is still known to be quite VENTURESOME & VAIN.

*jennifer coolidge vc* hi a google doc + pinned post are tbd but until then here’s perhaps an equally extensive intro, she’s a menace ty  

name: adelaide jane croft  nickname: ads, addie (if she likes you), aj (if you want to die) age: 22  dob: august 1, 1998 zodiac: leo sun, ?????? everything else mbti: entj, the commander powers: hypnokinesis, shapeshifting, seeing gods in dream, memory retrieval (minor) positive traits: venturesome, creative, hardworking, independent, ambitious negative traits: vain, cunning, bossy, stubborn, overcritical works: front desk associate at the library  clubs and sports: member of book club, chess club, herpetology club, women in leadership club, creative writing club, captain of the debate team, president of feminist alliance, and captain of the cheerleading squad character inspo: blair waldorf (gossip girl), jackie burkhart (that 70′s show), catherine the great (the great), cheryl blossom (riverdale), audrey horne (twin peaks), amy march (little women), cordelia chase (buffy the vampire slayer), fran fine (the nanny), daphne blake (scooby doo)

MENTIONS: alcoholism, coma, neglect

born in salem, massachusetts, adelaide croft is the daughter of sherry croft and hypnos, a product of an affair her mother has on her husband, senator richard croft-- sherry is a bored housewife trapped in a seemingly picturesque but loveless marriage when she meets hypnos, one thing leads to another, nine months later, adelaide is born 

richard knows from the get-go adelaide is not his child, it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out and despite the obvious strain this infidelity puts on the croft marriage, they remain together, richard claiming to the public that adelaide is his daughter while the disdain for what her mother did bubbled into resentment towards the young girl-- growing up she believed he was her real father

the crofts have one other child, an eldest daughter, prudence, and she is the pride and joy of the croft family, things came effortlessly to prudence, who received praise and attention from her parents for the slightest thing-- from a young age, she was actively pit against her older sister, who was as cruel as their father was at times, their relationship founded from rivalry

adelaide struggled for approval from her parents, who often brushed her off or ignored her. while her father was too focused on work, her mother too focused on drinking, and both too focused on prudence, it didn’t help that she developed strange habits from a young age, like claiming to speak to strange people in her dreams or how the world grew drowsy around her

found out she was a demigod at eleven, hypnos came to her in a dream, she laughed in his face, but very quickly realized this was real shit, when he offered the chance to go to a camp where there were other people like that she jumped at the chance-- attended camp halfblood during the summers of 2009-2016

trained pretty extensively during that time, was a casual quester, chosen usually because of her enthusiasm and hypnokinesis abilities, they did not all end well, she lost some people along the way, got some stuck in some sticky situations, will eventually go into more depth with these 

when she wasn’t at camp, she was climbing the social ranks back in massachusetts, winning academic awards, prom queen, staying on top of sports, practically anything in an attempt to make her parents acknowledge her, then when she realized they never would, specifically to spite them, simply trying to survive the rest of her high school career

started writing at a young age, journaling originally, but eventually, it grew into short stories, then novellas, etc.

always knew she was going to eonia, however, the process was sped up a little after an incident involving hypnokinesis, prudence, and a five day coma, adelaide denounced the crofts essentially, and using her memory retrieval power successfully for the first and only time, wiped herself from their memories (how long that will last, she is unsure), she went to live with a friend for a bit until she was accepted into eonia 

studies creative writing with the intent to write horror fiction based off the nightmares and dreams she has witnessed and influenced, currently in her fourth year here with intent to go to grad school afterwards

TL;DR: the younger daughter of sherry croft and hypnos, adopted by senator richard croft, grew up in a loveless, neglectful household that was seemingly perfect in public eye, had a sadistic older sister name prudence who was always in the spotlight, big queen bee vibes but went to chb and quested a bit, eventually came to eonia to study creative writing. 

some headcanons

actually an insomniac, that kind of fuck things up for her, but she finds ways to fall asleep eventually

coffee fiend 

chaotic bisexual

weapon of choice is a longsword she got from a quest, affectionately nicknamed tallulah, however she’s proficient in throwing knives and crossbows

has an albino ball python named boris after boris karloff 

LOVES halloween and all things horror, surprisingly morbid when you actually get to know her

favorite author is shirley jackson!

will astral project to you to bug you if she’s bored

the gods she has seen the most in her dreams beyond hypnos is hecate, apollo, and athena!!! she details all of the meetings just in case there’s important info

very nosy, will snoop for anything and everything

stressed 25/8 

i will update my wc doc asap i don’t have the capacity to do that currently but some wcs include rivals, exes, chb people, friends, enemies, hookups, someone to get her to relax, quest partners, uhhhhh someone she tutors perhaps, muses, hypnokinesis victims, someone she bit while she was a cat!, uhhhh

[abirdandabeast]

Rainy Days

“Now a soft kiss - Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.” -John Keats

Raven was not an outdoorsy person.

Sure, nature was pretty. Of course she thought so; she was wont to meditate on the roof during sunsets and bask in the salty ocean breeze. It was calming and gave her the chance to tune everything else out. She also would not deny the importance of wildlife for society as a whole; economically and otherwise.

But that did not mean she wanted to go traipsing out into the wilderness armed with only a potato rake and bulky, hard-to-walk-in waders.

Raven heaved a very obvious sigh and poked at rotting leaf litter with the butt of her rake. “Do we really need to do this?” she asked for the upteenth time, earning raised eyebrows from her fellow green skinned companion.

“Would you rather pay the city damages?”

She just scowled. This whole excursion was a result of the Titans’ contract with Jump City; they’d pay off any city damages via community service. There was a lost list of services they were provided year-to-year to choose from, ranging anywhere from cleaning trash out of the gutters to helping out at local schools.

This year, the city had given an option to help out at the local university. Apparently the school was short on teaching assistants, and somehow the Titans were qualified to help. Raven figured it had more to do with publicity than anything; after all, they didn’t do much of the actual teaching, they just showed up to classes and held office hours to help the students. Plus, their presence definitely helped the attendance and registration numbers.

Raven hissed, tugging herself free of a thorn bush. The forest was riddled with them, and she was pretty sure her shirt was riddled with holes now.

Biology was fun, Raven wouldn’t deny that. There was something fascinating about how all of biotic aspects of nature just fit together, and she enjoyed reading through various studies and articles. But she didn’t particularly care for field work.

This particular ‘job’ was one-hundred percent Beast Boy’s idea. As soon as he’d seen the class listed on their community service sheet, he’d begged Robin to let him do it. The Titan leader had consented, somewhat baffled by the changeling’s enthusiasm. After all, Beast Boy was not known for his teaching prowess, and he’d requested that Raven accompany him, lest things go south.

But Raven had an inkling that Beast Boy was more interested in the class itself than teaching. Which was why they were now participating in the class field trip out into the depths of a swampy forest, overturning logs and looking for herps.

“Besides,” the shapeshifter said as he expertly rolled over a log, “this is fun!”

Raven raised a brow, unimpressed. “And what exactly is fun about thorns and mud?” All she got for an answer was an excited yelp as Beast Boy dove for the ground. He popped up, holding a wriggling salamander in his hands.

“Dude, check it out! An Ambystoma opacum!”

She blinked. “Wait, you know the Latin names?”

“Uh, yeah.” Bafflement tickled her senses, matching the shapeshifter’s expression as he raised a brow at her. Raven shook herself and padded closer, peering down at the curious looking amphibian. She could admit that it was cute, with its black beady eyes and tiny little feet. The colors were intriguing as well; a black body with white patterns crisscrossing its back, giving the salamander a marbled appearance.

“Yep, it’s a salamander,” she said dryly. “Yet another animal you can shapeshift into.”

Beast Boy rolled his eyes and pulled out a plastic bag, dropping the salamander inside. “Yeah, great, a green marbled salamander. How accurate.” He bent down and scooped up some damp leaf litter and placed alongside the salamander inside the baggie. “We’ve already talked about this; it’s better for the students to get the field experience.”

Raven sighed. He was right of course; they had spoken about it. Repeatedly. Raven had tried to convince Dr. Carrleton, the professor, to merely show the class live specimens via Beast Boy, hoping to escape the obligatory field work. Both protested heavily against it; though Dr. Carrleton did ask the shapeshifter to supplement for any native species they couldn’t find themselves.

There were many reasons, of course, that Raven’s idea was rebuttable; students looking to study herpetology needed to know how to find said herps, how to handle real wild ones, and how to properly and ethically mark, weigh, and potentially collect said creatures. Plus, there was the added obstacle that Beast Boy couldn’t project any color aside from green, though his range was pretty extensive in terms of the color’s spectrum.  

“Come on, let’s go check out that creek,” Beast Boy said, cutting through her thoughts. Raven just shrugged and followed after him, carefully picking her way through the shrubs and briar bushes.

The ambling creek carved a path along the forest floor, sloping down into a little gurgling gully. Muddy banks jutted out around the curves and fallen branches and mossy rocks peaked out of the water. Raven watched as Beast Boy leapt into the creek, water spraying out in all directions. She eyes the slopes, trying to figure out the easiest way to join him.

Should she shuffle down? Or find a less steep section?

Light drops splattered on her nose, and Raven directed her gaze upwards. The forest canopy was not quite complete yet, but there were enough leaves developed to obscure her image of the sky. Still, Raven could see hints of grey overhead, and she scowled.

Great. Just what she needed.

“Beast Boy!”

The squeaky voice grated on Raven’s ears, and she cringed. Crashing through the forest were two of the Herpetology students, both of which were currently lusting over Beast Boy like dogs in heat. It was utterly disgusting, the intensity of their desire, and it made Raven want to barf.

“Look what we got!” the first girl squealed, sliding down into the creek with ease. She tossed her golden pony tail as she thrust the baggie into his face, a charming and grotesquely flirtatious grin curved onto her lips. Beast Boy plucked the bag from her grasp, his gaze focused solely on the critter enclosed inside.

“Damn, Lisa, that’s awesome!” He shot the student a playful look. “What species is it?”

Lisa opened her mouth to speak, but her friend on the bank beat her to the punch. “It’s Desmognathus ruber!”

“Yep, that’s right, Emily!” Beast Boy chirped, handing the bad back to Lisa. Emily’s face contorted into a grin so smug, that Raven felt an urge to smack it right off. She suppressed a growl.

Stupid college girls being stupidly inappropriate.

She marched forward, ignoring the rain that was starting to come down harder. Raven jabbed her potato rake into the mud to assist in her descent as she tried to not fall on her face. Unfortunately, Raven misjudged just how muddy the slope was. Her supposedly extra-grip waders did nothing to help her keep her footing, and she found herself sliding down the bank and splashing right into the creek.

Raven floundered, trying to pull herself up out of the water. She coughed and spat out creekwater, barely managing to stagger to her feet.

The section she’d fallen into was deep. So deep, in fact, that her waders were now full of water. Raven bit her lip hard.

Don’t shriek, don’t cry. Don’t shriek, don’t cry.

“Shit, Rae! You okay?”

Beast Boy’s voice broke her out of her reverie, and Raven blinked at the green shapeshifter. He half jogged, half waded through the water, rain dripping off of his face. It was starting to really come down, which was so not helping the situation.

He reached for her wader strap, concern billowing off of him. “Here, let me-”

“Stop!”

A roll of thunder accompanied her voice. She smacked his hand away, narrowing her eyes. “I have had enough of this stupid field trip. I am soaked, muddy, and standing in the stupid rain.” A bitter laugh bubbled from her lips, and she tossed her hands in the air. “And for what? A stupid contract? No. I’m done.”

Raven worked to unfasten her wader straps, her numb fingers fumbling and awkward. Green hands entered her vision and clasped her hands, making her pause.

“Let me help,” Beast Boy murmured. Raven wasn’t sure what it was, but something in his voice enraptured her. The anger she felt dissipated in an instant, and Raven watched dumbly as Beast Boy undid the straps. Some of the water spilled out, though she’d have to actually take the damn things off to get it all out.

“There.”

Raven looked up, catching Beast Boy’s gaze. She sucked in a breath. Wet hair hung in his face, dripping with rainwater. His eyes were bright amid the growing storm, luring Raven deeper into their mossy irises. She felt his thumb brush against her jaw and she shivered.

Tingles spread across her skin, making her feel warm despite the water that clung to her skin and clothes. Raven could feel the college girls watching, but they didn’t seem to matter anymore.

Not with Beast Boy this close.

He kissed her then. His lips tasted of rainwater and peppermint, a taste Raven was quickly becoming addicted to. She hooked her hands into his damp shirt, pulling him closer.

Raven had read many books. She’d encountered countless kissing scenes before, each one more intricate and interesting than the next. But nothing really compared to the feel of Beast Boy’s lips on hers, and the blanket of euphoria that wrapped around them tight.

The broke apart, their foreheads brushing.

“We should probably get out of the rain,” Beast Boy murmured. Raven hummed, glancing up at the obscured sky.

“Perhaps. But I don’t mind staying for a little while.”

The shapeshifter raised his brows, a playful grin warming his features. “Oh?”

She shushed him by kissing him again, there beneath the rain.

I had no clue how to end this. Oh well. Enjoy!

-mod vixensheart

[princesa-alisakura]

Chapters: 8/? Fandom: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Katsuki Yuuri/Victor Nikiforov, Katsuki Yuuri & Yuri Plisetsky Characters: Katsuki Yuuri, Victor Nikiforov, Yuri Plisetsky Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, herpetology, herpetologist Yuuri Katsuki, IguanaYuri, Nagaverse, Naga, SnakeVictor, Yuri is Yuuri's lizard son, Rating May Change, Yuuri is a lizard lover, Protective yurio, alone in the woods, Victor is love, Hiking, Hiking Porn, Mating Rituals, Shapeshifting, Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters Summary:

Ever since he was a boy, Yuuri Katsuki had always wanted to be a herpetologist. When he was eight, he was given a iguana he named Yurio. At twenty-three, he decides to move to a house in the country near the forest. They settle in nicely until one day Yuuri decies to go into the forest to study the snakes until he tumbles down to a small riverbank and loses consciousness. When he come to he realizes two things: He was saved by a beautiful man with blue eyes and a heart shaped smile and...... he was wrapped in a silver tail attached to the man?!

[cashcounts]

What Do We Lose If We Lose Wild Axolotls?

On a crisp November morning a little after dawn, grey mist unspools from the surface of the water of a maze of canals and island farms called Xochimilco. I’m just a dozen miles south of the center of Mexico City, a sprawling mega-metropolis, but right now, that’s easy to forget.

Herons line the trees along the banks of the canals. Mountains fade in at the horizon. This early, it’s cold enough that Alejandra Ramos and I are shivering as our boat hums through waterways. When we arrive at Antonio Mendez-Rosas’s farm, the vegetables still look like they’ve been dipped in sugar crystals.

Frost glazes Antonio Mendez-Rosas’s vegetables early one morning.

These canals are the very last wild habitat left for what we’d like to find—a strange salamander called the axolotl, which Ramos, as part of a team from Mexico’s National Autonomous University, is working desperately to save from extinction.

The axolotl is famous and beloved, a celebrity among amphibians. Named after an Aztec god and the inspiration for a Pokemon, it can heal itself better than Wolverine from the X-Men, even regrowing lost limbs. The people of Mexico City recently chose it as their official emoji.

Axolotls, once common throughout Xochimilco, are now rare in the wild.

But there aren’t any here today. Mendez-Rosas, the farmer, says that fishermen used to cast a net and catch 40 at a time. Now, standing by the side of a canal and beckoning us closer, he points to the last place he saw an axolotl wriggling in the mud…more than a year ago. Their population density in these wetlands has nosedived from an estimated 2,340 salamanders per square mile in 1998 to less than 14 per square mile in 2014, the year of the last census. No one knows how many are left now.

On its surface, the axolotl’s plight is the same one faced by countless endangered species around the globe. In Xochimilco, as in many other places, humans have pressed heavily against an ecosystem, imperiling plucky, charismatic creatures. Here, our slimy protagonist is beset on all sides. First, its wetlands have shrunk as Mexico City’s population exploded from about 3 million in the 1950s to some 21 million today. Second, some farmers have introduced invasive carp and tilapia, which gobble up axolotl eggs and compete with adults for food. And third, pollution and sewage have reduced the water quality.

Mist rises off the canals of Xochimilco.

But like all good stories, the quest to save the axolotl is more than it seems. Set in crowded Mexico City, it is a microcosm of conservation in the 21st century. It isn’t a binary choice between pristine wilderness and human despoilment—Xochimilco has been home to island farms like Mendez-Rosas’s for over a thousand years, with axolotls thriving alongside people. And unlike many fragile species, the axolotl won’t go extinct if it’s extirpated from Xochimilco. For well over a century, the salamanders have been raised in laboratories and kept as pets across the globe. They’ll continue to exist as curios and sources of biomedical inspiration.

The future of this salamander will be determined not by which plot of land we chose to preserve, but by how we answer a deeper question: What do we lose if Xochimilco loses its axolotls?

A Colonial Conquest

I first caught the axolotl bug this past summer, when a friend went on a few dates with a grad student who kept some in a genetics lab. Once I started looking, they turned up everywhere. I saw them preserved in jars in the herpetology collection at Harvard University and others alive in a developmental biology lab upstairs. I even met a pet axolotl owned by a toxicologist in Japan.

There’s a good chance that each of these animals can trace their ancestry to just one event, the start of the global axolotl diaspora. In the summer of 1863, while the Union and the Confederacy were busy slugging it out at Vicksburg, France invaded Mexico City to collect on unpaid debts. Hot on their heels, naturalists and biologists followed, as often happened with Enlightenment imperialists.

At the beginning of that century, Napoleon’s troops had dragged the Rosetta stone and other ancient wonders out of Egypt. In conquered Mexico, the French went searching for archeological discoveries to match the Rosetta stone. Perhaps they could find another mystical object with the power to unlock vast recesses of time, to illuminate hidden relationships. They did—only it was biological, not archeological. In 1864, 34 live axolotls were shipped to Paris, and six of those were given to biologist Auguste Duméril. He bred them and shared their progeny with international colleagues. Lab axolotls have been going strong ever since.

A closeup of wildtype axolotls.

Almost immediately, Duméril’s axolotls earned their keep. Axolotls never metamorphose, a curiosity among amphibians and something Duméril likely knew at the time. Instead of losing their gills and crawling onto land like other salamanders, axolotls happily spend their entire lives underwater. They even breed in that form. But in 1865, something even weirder happened. Some of Duméril’s second generation of axolotls spontaneously transformed into air-breathing adults.

It’s possible the Aztecs already knew that axolotls could do this. The concordance is just too perfect: their namesake god Xolotl, twin brother of Quetzalcoatl, had the power to shapeshift. Either way, this hidden extra rung in axolotl development helped early 20th century scientists discover thyroid hormones, which can reliably induce the change.

Today, it seems fair to ask whether the descendants of Duméril’s six salamanders, having lived past the sesquicentennial of their captivity, are even true axolotls anymore.

Digging in, I found a 2015 paper titled, charmingly, “A Tale of Two Axolotls.” One of the paper’s authors, Randall Voss, runs the Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center, a repository of lab axolotls hosted at University of Kentucky and funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. The Kentucky salamanders are different from wild ones in some key respects, he told me on the phone.

Unlike many other salamander species, axolotls keep their external gills into adulthood.

For one, this population is nicer. “It was clearly selected to like human beings,” Voss says. “If you walk into our facility, they’ll just instantly make eye contact, come to the edge of the tank, and start begging for food.” They grow and breed fast, too. But compared with Xochimilco’s axolotls, they are all genetic hybrids. Over time, for reasons that are not totally clear, the lab population of axolotls has been crossbred with other tiger salamanders, the larger taxonomic group to which axolotls belong. That has left many lab specimens with a host of foreign genes, including those that code for a milky white skin, unlike the darker shades of wild axolotls.

Even the wild axolotl had long been an urban animal, says Luis Zambrano, a biologist at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City and another of the “Two Axolotls” authors. It thrived alongside the Aztecs for centuries. But the axolotl wasn’t appreciated in modern, developed Mexico until the last few years, he says, well after development had put it in the crosshairs.

In 2002, the federal government tasked Zambrano with a simple mission: form a scientific opinion about the state of this species. But first he had to catch some. He set out traps full of minnows, stretched out gill nets—nothing. “It was a nightmare,” he says. “I said I would finish this work and never come back to Xochimilco.” Finally, he went to a local festival and met fishermen who knew how to catch axolotls the old way, with cast nets. If you want to get axolotls, they said, hire us. So he did, eventually finding a long-term fishing partner for his research.

Zambrano did return to Xochimilco, again and again, and in the intervening years, he has witnessed its axolotl population dwindle. Faced with a bleak state of affairs, his team has two plans to save the wild salamander. Plan A, the optimistic one, is to protect some of Xochimilco by preserving old-school, axolotl-friendly farming practices. Plan B is to establish another axolotl habitat—an off-world colony, if you will—in the hopes that Xochimilico will be restored…or as a failsafe if it isn’t.

A Future Like the Past

Even as the species hangs in the balance in Mexico City, the axolotl is still a star on the rise in the research world. After all, this salamander could well spark a revolution in medicine, giving us the power to regenerate tissue, heal any body part, maybe even regrow an entire arm or leg.

In the beginning of February, an international team took a major step toward tapping into that power, with the announcement in the scientific journal Nature that the full axolotl genome has been mapped for the first time. With 32 billon base pairs, it’s the longest genome previously sequenced, ten times longer than ours.

To understand how axolotls might someday transform medicine, I meet Jessica Whited in the lobby of a patient building on the bustling campus of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Whited, a researcher in the hospital’s department of orthopedic surgery, whisks me upstairs in a whirlwind of energy. In her office, she pulls an undergraduate biology textbook off the shelf and flips to the index in the back.

“Regeneration,” she says, scanning. “In this entire textbook, there is one page. 768. This is why I wanted to work on it.” There’s another reason, too. Her grandfather had a peripheral artery disease, in which plaque chokes off blood flow in a person’s extremities. Half of amputations come from such diseases these days, Whited says, and the other half from trauma. Her grandfather required a series of amputations: a few toes at first, and then his leg below the knee. He died at 62.

Recently, Whited’s team has investigated what exactly happens when a salamander regrows an amputated limb. After about the fifth amputation, even axolotl tissue eventually gives up and responds like a human amputee. That lets her compare axolotl stumps that can regenerate against those that can’t.

Axolotls are kept in many labs to study their special regenerative abilities.

When these stumps didn’t sprout new limbs, it seemed to be because regeneration was blocked, not because it wasn’t sufficiently encouraged. Whited found that the genes in inactive stumps were expressing in overdrive, as if those genes were actively stopping the process. (Until this point, scientists had mostly looked for the opposite—genes that are silent in stumps but turn on when a limb needs to regrow.)

And at least one of these genes that stops axolotl tissue from regenerating is closely related to a gene in mammals that causes scarring. Regrowing a limb, it seems, could be an ancestral response that our own bodies just suppress.

Another bit of dogma has been that the magic of regeneration happens right at the stump. But that’s not true in axolotls, Whited discovered. When they lose a limb, cells in the heart, spinal chord, liver, and perhaps all over the body are called into action and start dividing. This happens in mice, too—if you injure a mouse’s leg, muscle stem cells in the other leg start dividing—and it may happen in humans as well.

“It’s possible that we’re not as bad off, from a medical standpoint, as we thought we were,” Whited says. This body-wide response is like the seed of regeneration. Axolotls form a mass of cells that acts as fertile soil for that seed, while mice and humans don’t. But in the future, maybe, we could engineer a more suitable stump, she says.

As we talk, Whited, who has built up a deep love for her subjects over the years, peppers me with question about my reporting on the wild axolotls in Mexico City. I turn her questions around. As a researcher, she has pretty much everything she needs with the lab salamanders, save maybe a little more genetic diversity. So why care about the wild ones?

For once, she’s flummoxed. But just for a second. First, she says, the axolotl is a poster child for all the species with miraculous, useful adaptations that we don’t find before it’s too late. But she’s more philosophical about it, too. “I’m not a conservation biologist, but I’m still a biologist, and I’m still a human being,” she says. “I don’t know what to say to the person who thinks that it’s not worth saving.”

An Insurance Policy

On the phone, Zambrano had invited me to Mexico to see the conservation work myself. A few months later, I take him up on the offer and hop on a plane.

First up is Zambrano’s Plan B, which is hidden in the middle of the city off the side of the highway. The project is in the purview of Alejandra Ramos, a postdoc in his lab. She takes me there on my first evening in Mexico by hailing a cab and directing the driver from the back seat.

When we get out, Ramos knocks on a thick metal slab, and a tiny rectangle at head height slides open like we’re begging entrance at a medieval castle. An elderly security guard lets us in.

This is the Cantera Oriente, an abandoned rock quarry. “Very few people know this place exists,” Ramos tells me as she rummages through her equipment in a small closet tucked behind a women’s bathroom. After mining ceased here, groundwater springs bubbled up from underneath, creating four small lakes in a bowl surrounded by unnaturally steep cliffs. Insects came, and countless birds did, too, transforming one of the city’s deadest places into an artificial, but remarkably alive, oasis. The university now uses it as an ecological research site.

Recently, these lakes have also hosted ten axolotls implanted with radio trackers. For an animal so often studied, our basic ecological understanding of axolotls in the wild is fragmented and incomplete. Ramos is trying to understand how axolotls spend their time. She advertised online for some two dozen volunteers to track the salamanders day and night, mostly attracting biology and veterinary students from the university.

Cantera Oriente, once a quarry, has been mooted as a wild axolotl reserve.

Zambrano’s work has drawn attention to the little critters. Once unloved, axolotls have become the toast of the town. One of the volunteers showed me her own axolotl illustrations. Another shared a smartphone picture of a new axolotl mural in Reforma, an august neighborhood at the heart of the city. And the same government office that ran the official emoji contest just donated a submarine drone to Zambrano’s research effort. “I didn’t even know those existed,” Ramos says.

As the sun sets, Ramos heads home. Volunteers Andres, Esmeralda, and Karen come through the gate. We walk down a path to one of the lakes, push a boat in, and row around as the twilight deepens, brushing off spiders, listening to the beeps from a radio antenna as we try to maneuver the boat on top of each axolotl to record its position.

As they work, the volunteers, delighted to be experiencing nature in the middle of a megacity, try to scare me with a ghost story. They tell me the old security guard claims he sees a man here at night, a figure who stands behind the pine trees, ducks out, and hides again. But the only ghost we find is a faint blip on an unexpected frequency band. In January 2017, the volunteers say, two radio-tagged axolotls were released for an earlier experiment. The female was never caught again. Could this be her?

When I ask Ramos about it later, she is skeptical. The radio transmitters die after only about 50 days. This blip is just signal interference. But the basic fact is true, that not every axolotl in the Cantera Oriente is accounted for. It’s a welcome development, she says. Sooner or later, some will breed here, even though it’s a different ecosystem than the swampy canals they evolved in.

In a previous job, Ramos spent a year on a mountain in Baja California, working with California condors. Those giant raptors have been saved from extinction, but their survival relies on heavy human involvement. She wonders—worries—whether axolotls will reach the same point. A vault of wild-ish axolotls in the Cantera Oriente would be a good insurance policy, a compromise. Better still would be never having to use it.

A Future Like the Past

There’s one more possible future left, the most hopeful one. It harkens to the past, toward the kind of balance established centuries ago by Xochimilco’s pre-Columbian residents. On his sun-drenched plot in Xochimilco, I speak to Mendez-Rosas, the farmer, while Ramos translates. Mendez-Rosas, 42, says the artificial island we’re standing on has been in his family a long time. He has 17th-century documents attesting as much in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and another paper from 1868, the same year Dumeril started sending axolotls abroad along Europe’s growing railroad network.

Mendez-Rosas’ grandfather and great-grandfather taught him how to farm here, using nutrient-rich muck shoveled out of the waterways instead of fertilizers and pesticides. And through her cooking, his great-grandmother taught him about the axolotl—with its pleasing fishy flavor and cartilaginous crunch, served with local herbs and maize. You eat it head to toe, he says.

The axolotl was a part of the area’s ecological heritage, yes, but it was also food, a part of the culture. Axolotls fed the Aztecs and Cortez’s conquering army alike. In the 1820s, a visiting European naturalist praised their flavor and wrote that you could buy them in nearby markets either alive or roasted.

Now Mendez-Rosas is working with neighboring farmers to build an ecological refuge. Using organic products and old-school farming methods, they aim to support not just themselves but the axolotls and the rest of Xochimilco’s native species. Safeguarding the right habitat will take a fusion of traditional and scientific knowledge, he argues. With a rake, he pulls out a clump of plants to illustrate his own expertise. Here are the little roly-poly crustaceans the axolotl eats, he says. Here’s where they hide. Here’s where they attach their eggs.

That kind of collaboration may be long overdue. For centuries, Western naturalists have monologued about the axolotl. “The colonialism is not just that they brought important animals or plants to Europe,” Zambrano says at the university, it’s also that they didn’t ask Mexican scientists or common people what they already knew. “They despised the local knowledge,” he says. But by joining with Mendez-Rosas, he hopes to turn that around. “If the Aztecs did something for 2,000 years, maybe it’s working.”

Antonio Mendez-Rosas’s farm, soon after dawn.

After chatting with Mendez-Rosas, we take a ride through the canals as the sun continues to climb. By the time we get back to the boat dock, food stands are opening, and a telltale reggaeton beat pulses through a stereo somewhere. Xochimilco, this surviving piece of Mexico City-that-was, is a favorite destination for tourists and locals alike. That attention, and the detritus left by so many visitors, isn’t necessarily great for the axolotl either. By cherishing Xochimilco, modernity is also squeezing it just a little harder.

The ideal goal, Zambrano says, is not to save the last wild axolotls but to protect this entire one-of-a-kind ecosystem. It’s what Mendez-Rosas wants, too. In ten or 20 years, he hopes his land will be bursting with crops and the refuge teeming with animals. “And I want to eat axolotls again,” he says.