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SPEAKER_02: But my first pet was kind of an odd one. That's producer Emmett Fitzgerald.
SPEAKER_02: At a party in college, my friend Will handed me this Tupperware filled with water. I took off the top and there was this little animal floating there. It looked like an adorable chubby tadpole with legs and this delicate feathery boa of gills wrapped around its neck. Its face was locked in a placid, almost enlightened smile, like it knew something I didn't about the secret of life. Will told me that I was holding a kind of salamander called an axolotl and that he was giving this axolotl to me.
SPEAKER_07: Oh yes, my favorite kind of gift. The kind you have to work really hard just to keep alive.
SPEAKER_02: I put the top back on the Tupperware and named her Lenny. It turned out that Will had taken about 20 axolotl embryos from a biology lab where they had been discarded. He was raising baby salamanders out of his bedroom and distributing them to friends across campus, along with detailed instructions on how to care for them. I got Lenny a big fish tank and put her right on my mantelpiece.
SPEAKER_07: Axolotls are amphibians. They hatch from eggs laid in the water. But while most amphibians will eventually transform into an adult form that lives on land and walks on four legs, axolotls are different. They never transform.
SPEAKER_02: They live their whole lives in the water, like teenagers that never grow up. And that's not even the coolest thing about them. It turns out that axolotls have a superpower. People discovered it after observing axolotls biting off each other's tails and legs. They realized that these animals would grow back whatever was bit off or cut off of them.
SPEAKER_02: This is Jeremiah Smith, a biologist at the University of Kentucky who works with axolotls. He says that they are nature's great regenerators. So they can regenerate their arms, they can regenerate their tail, piece of their liver, parts of their hearts.
SPEAKER_02: They can even regenerate pieces of their brain. As long as they're still alive, axolotls will regrow basically anything. You can't chop their head off and have them regrow their whole head.
SPEAKER_06: But most other things can regenerate.
SPEAKER_02: Those remarkable superpowers have turned the axolotl into a scientific superstar. Biologists have devoted their careers to this salamander that never grows up and can regrow its toes and tail.
SPEAKER_07: And the dream for many of these scientists is that we might one day figure out how exactly axolotls do what they do. And maybe even learn to harness that power for humans.
SPEAKER_02: And this scientific obsession has turned the axolotl into one of the most abundant laboratory animals in biology. Today, smiling salamanders like Lenny can be found swimming in tanks in universities all around the world. Which is a little strange, because in the wild, they've only ever been found in one place. Okay, well, my name is Luis Zambrano.
SPEAKER_03: I work in the National University of Autonomous Ophthalmology as a researcher in the Biology Institute.
SPEAKER_02: Luis Zambrano is a biologist based in Mexico City. One of my fields is the conservation of one of the most iconic species in Mexico, which is the axolotl.
SPEAKER_03: There are a few different aquatic salamanders in Mexico, but Luis studies the Ambustoma mexicanum,
SPEAKER_02: also known in Spanish as the ajolote, and in the Nahuatl language as axolotl, and in English as axolotl. Which is the most iconic of this sort of bunch of species of salamanders that lives only in Mexico City.
SPEAKER_03: The axolotl has only one natural habitat, and it's not some protected wilderness area.
SPEAKER_02: It's one of the largest cities in the world. Mexico City is located in a highland valley, and hundreds of years ago, the valley was filled with five lakes.
SPEAKER_07: Over centuries, various indigenous groups lived around these lakes, including the Aztecs. The Aztecs farmed on top of artificial islands called chinampas, and it was in and around these floating farms that the axolotl thrived.
SPEAKER_02: The Aztecs were fascinated by these strange salamanders.
SPEAKER_07: They ate them, and they used them to make medicines, and they considered the axolotl a sacred animal. The name axolotl comes from the god Xolotl, who was a sort of shape-shifting trickster figure.
SPEAKER_02: According to Aztec mythology, when our sun was created, it was stuck in one place all the time. And so the gods decided to sacrifice themselves to try and get the sun to move across the sky. But when his turn was up, Xolotl decided he didn't want to go through with it. He ran away, and he tried to transform himself in many different things.
SPEAKER_02: He turned himself into an ear of corn and an agave plant. And finally, he transformed himself into an ashalotl.
SPEAKER_02: These aquatic salamanders have been important symbols in Mexican culture and art. You can find them in the murals of Diego Rivera and in the poems of Octavio Paz. So it was really, really attached to the Mexican culture for many, many years, more than 2,000 years, basically, since we, as Mexicans, are here in the valley.
SPEAKER_02: And for all those years, the axolotl remained confined to that valley. You basically couldn't find them anywhere else in the world. Until a French expedition to Mexico in 1863.
SPEAKER_07: During the trip, French officials collected a bunch of plants and animals to bring back with them to Europe, including a group of axolotls. So what we do know from historical records is that 34 animals were collected and taken to the museum in Paris.
SPEAKER_08: This is amphibian expert Richard Griffiths.
SPEAKER_02: He is a professor at the Dural Institute of Conservation and Ecology at the University of Kent. Richard says that in Paris, scientists started breeding some of those 34 salamanders that were taken from Mexico City. And that proved very successful.
SPEAKER_08: And those descendants of those animals from the Paris Museum have been spread around the world.
SPEAKER_02: From the very beginning, European scientists were fascinated by the axolotl's strange appearance and its perpetual tadpole life cycle. And they started using them as model organisms for laboratory research. And axolotls were suited for the job. They survived well in captivity and were easy to breed.
SPEAKER_07: Their cells were also large and simple to study. And later on, their genes proved to be easy to manipulate.
SPEAKER_02: This means that you can use them as a good model for carrying out laboratory experiments on things such as the development of embryos,
SPEAKER_08: our hormonal systems such as the control of metamorphosis. Axolotls were important collaborators in a lot of 20th century science.
SPEAKER_07: They helped us understand how organs developed in vertebrates and the causes of diseases like spina bifida.
SPEAKER_02: And scientists had always been interested in the salamanders' regenerative talents. But it's only in the last few decades, as we've come to better understand axolotl genetics, that we've really started to unlock the secrets of their superpower. Their genome is like utterly fascinating.
SPEAKER_02: Jeremiah Smith has spent years of his professional life poring over the axolotl's massive genome, in part to try and figure out how they got so good at regeneration. Presumably, somewhere amongst all of that DNA, all of that information, is the information of how a salamander grows back a limb.
SPEAKER_02: One theory has to do with scarring. When humans have a large cut or some other kind of wound, the tissue that grows back is scar tissue. But axolotls don't scar.
SPEAKER_07: Part of what's thought to be responsible for their ability to regenerate is that they resolve the initial wound in a way that doesn't involve scarring,
SPEAKER_06: or that involves much less scarring.
SPEAKER_02: Jeremiah and his colleague Dr. Randall Voss recently finished building this comprehensive map of the axolotl genome. And as scientists learn more about axolotl genetics, there is a growing optimism that humans might actually one day learn how to imitate them.
SPEAKER_07: And so I had to ask Jeremiah the question that I imagine he's been asked dozens of times by annoying science journalists like me.
SPEAKER_02: From your perspective, like how possible is it that humans are ever going to be able to grow back an arm? Yeah, I mean, it's a hard question to answer with any certainty.
SPEAKER_06: I mean, one person that interviewed me a couple of years ago, I said, you know, I'll be dead before I would have a chance to grow an arm back. I don't know if that's the right perspective anymore. We're probably not going to be regrowing entire arms anytime soon.
SPEAKER_07: But Jeremiah thinks that with the help of new genetic techniques like CRISPR, the lessons that we're learning from axolotls could help humans heal more minor wounds. I would say in the next 10 years, like we might be effectively mimicking what salamanders can do.
SPEAKER_06: I don't think that's beyond the scope of reality.
SPEAKER_02: Largely because of all of this regeneration research, axolotls have proliferated in research institutions all around the world. But even as we continue to breed these animals in the name of scientific progress, we are driving the wild population in Mexico to the brink of extinction.
SPEAKER_07: In the last 50, 60 years, the population of the actual is becoming very, very low.
SPEAKER_03: That's Luis Zambrano again, and he says the decline really traces all the way back to the 1500s and the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
SPEAKER_02: In the centuries that followed, people drained the water out of the Valley of Mexico, and a megacity developed on top of the dry lake bed.
SPEAKER_07: Today, the historic lake system is all but gone.
SPEAKER_02: There's really only a small marshy remnant left in the south part of Mexico City, an area known as Xochimilco. So now we have a huge problem because we only have the 2% of the huge lake system, and we only have 2%, which is Xochimilco.
SPEAKER_03: In this area is the only place that the axolotl now can survive. As a young biologist, Luis wasn't all that interested in salamanders. He was more of a fish guy.
SPEAKER_02: I used to be a fish man. I used to study and work with fish.
SPEAKER_02: Then in 1998, a colleague enlisted him to help with this big survey that they were doing of all of the axolotls in Xochimilco. And it ended up being surprisingly difficult work. So at the beginning I didn't like it at all. So I said, okay, I will do this, and I will never work with axolotls or Xochimilco again.
SPEAKER_03: But then one of the most important axolotl scientists, Dr. Virginia Graue, tragically got cancer.
SPEAKER_02: Which meant that she wasn't going to be able to finish her research. And she went to Luis. To say, okay, I got cancer, but we need to finish this research.
SPEAKER_03: And please finish it because I won't be able to do that. And I remember Dr. Graue as a very, very important piece of my life now. Yeah. She gave you a mission.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, she gave me a mission actually.
SPEAKER_03: And in this second wave of projects, I fall in love with the axolotl and with Xochimilco. It was like falling in love within a second date, basically.
SPEAKER_02: But as he was falling in love with Mexico's much-loved salamander, he was also discovering just how much trouble it was in. In Dr. Graue's last survey of Xochimilco in 1998, she had found that there were about 6,000 salamanders per square kilometer. But when Luis completed his follow-up in 2003...
SPEAKER_03: We only found 1,000 per square kilometer. It was a huge decline. And from the data, Luis could see that lots of juvenile axolotls weren't surviving into adulthood.
SPEAKER_02: And so he had to figure out why not. Why were all these baby salamanders dying? I mean, I can tell you this in less than 10 minutes, but it took us about 10 years to understand that.
SPEAKER_03: Science is like that.
SPEAKER_07: The arc of science is long, but it bends towards a truth that you can explain in 10 minutes, if you're lucky.
SPEAKER_02: Luis and his colleagues eventually determined that there were a few different things contributing to the collapse of the population, including invasive fish species like carp and tilapia, poor water quality, and illegal development.
SPEAKER_03: And we saw that the population is going, it would be going to extinction really, really fast if we don't do anything.
SPEAKER_02: The combination of human obsession and human neglect has turned the axolotl into this bizarre contradiction. It's so common in universities that someone just handed me one in college. And yet, at the same time, it's an endangered species.
SPEAKER_08: It's a paradox that you have this species that is probably the most widespread amphibian in captivity in the world, and yet it is critically endangered in the wild. That's Richard Griffiths again.
SPEAKER_08: I can't think of any other species, mammal, bird, fish, reptile, and amphibian, that has a parallel with that really.
SPEAKER_07: Given that dynamic, you can't help but wonder if they should just release a bunch of the laboratory axolotls into the wild. Yeah, I thought about that too. I mean, as much as I loved Lenny, I would have happily donated her to the cause.
SPEAKER_02: You're a monster.
SPEAKER_02: Well, don't worry. It's not going to happen because everybody that I talked to for this story said it was a pretty stupid idea. For one, the animals probably wouldn't survive anyway. And two, you run the risk of spreading diseases. But the more fundamental problem with that plan is that the wild axolotl and the laboratory axolotl, they aren't really the same animal anymore. There's a very good argument to be made to say that the laboratory animals are not axolotls.
SPEAKER_02: That's Jeremiah Smith again. He says that over their long history in scientific institutions, the laboratory axolotl changed. At some point, scientists introduced an albino tiger salamander into the population. So today, the salamanders in labs are more like axolotl-tiger-salamander hybrids. And they've changed in other ways too. They're a little bit cuter and cuddlier, less like a wild creature, I guess, than an axolotl from Zosia milko.
SPEAKER_06: If they're cute, like if you won't forget to feed them, then they'll live to make their own offspring, right? They're still great every generation.
SPEAKER_02: But at this point, the laboratory axolotl is more like a poodle than a wolf.
SPEAKER_04: For example, I walk into my laboratory and there's a whole bank of tanks with axolotls full of them.
SPEAKER_02: This is Dr. Randall Voss. He's a professor of biology at the University of Kentucky and the head of an axolotl research lab there. And I just walk around the facility and they just follow me just to watch me because they know that humans feed them.
SPEAKER_04: They're like my dog following me around the apartment.
SPEAKER_04: Oh, absolutely. No, absolutely. And you have something that's really different, I think, than what we think of the axolotl from Mexico, the natural population. In my mind, it's already a different species. A species created by science and a species that probably shouldn't be released back into the wild.
SPEAKER_02: Just like we're not going to release poodles into the Yukon to hunt wolves.
SPEAKER_02: But we have to do something, right? Don't we owe it to this animal that has given us so much? Luis Zambrano certainly thinks so. His devotion to the axolotl has only deepened over the years. It's less intense, but by far stronger. That is my feeling about the axolotls.
SPEAKER_03: In some moments, well, not in some moments, most of the time I have them in my emotion and my heart, basically, that say, OK, I have to do more things to save this very nice species.
SPEAKER_02: Luis knew that they needed to do everything they could to clean up the ecosystem at Xochimilco. And deal with the various issues that were sending the axolotl to extinction. First, we have to reduce the population of Carpentillapia.
SPEAKER_03: Second, we have to improve the water quality. And third, we have to stop the illegal and illegal organization in the canals of Xochimilco. But Luis also knew he didn't really have time to wait around for the government to implement some big top-down restoration program.
SPEAKER_02: So we decided to change the focus in terms of restoration and not to see the authorities as a solution, but the local people as the solution.
SPEAKER_03: In particular, they focused on the farmers, or the chinamperos, who still farm on islands in the water.
SPEAKER_02: Luis and his partners started working closely alongside them. And the idea was to try and give farmers money and the tools that they needed to improve the habitat around their own piece of land. They designed simple, low-tech filters that farmers can use to seal off individual canals.
SPEAKER_07: The filter helps to increase the water quality and avoid the entrance of Carpentillapia.
SPEAKER_02: They might not be able to fix Xochimilco all at once, but they want to create pockets of clean, tilapia-free water where the axolotl population can recover. It's hard to say how well these efforts are working. In his most recent surveys, Luis hasn't found a single axolotl, although he says that local farmers that he's working with have reported seeing them inside their canals. And so there's a lot at stake in Luis's work, the fate of an ancient ecosystem and its iconic animal. And what happens in Mexico City could also have ramifications for all those scientists studying regeneration.
SPEAKER_07: In addition to being a professor at Kentucky, Randall Voss is the head of the university's Ambostoma Genetic Stock Center.
SPEAKER_02: They breed axolotls and distribute them around the world. We provide axolotls to people for their research efforts.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, they're basically the place to go if you want axolotls to do research with. And the amazing thing about these salamanders that are being bred at Kentucky today is that they're descendants of the 34 animals which were taken from Xochimilco in that French expedition 150 years ago. They are the oldest population of laboratory animals in the world. Which means that Emmet's axolotl linea probably was related to those 34 animals that were brought to Paris.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, she almost certainly was. And while that lack of genetic diversity is great for doing experiments, it can also be a problem. It can lead to inbreeding. I mean, I think there are a lot of species that if you apply the same kind of management strategy over the time that axolotls have been in captivity, they probably would be extinct.
SPEAKER_02: Randall says that there is no immediate cause for alarm with his laboratory salamanders. But yeah, it's a concern. I mean, I do think it's important to consider that there may be other sources of genetic variation out there in the world that could be used to invigorate our population.
SPEAKER_02: In an ideal world, they would introduce some more wild salamanders into the lab population. But those are pretty hard to come by these days. And if the wild axolotl were to go extinct at Xochimilco, there would be no pool of genetic material left for scientists to pull from. Somewhere in the long story of the Mexican axolotl, the narrative diverged. It became two stories. One about science and biomedical innovation. And the other about habitat loss and an iconic but increasingly endangered animal. And these stories may very well continue on their separate paths. But it's also possible to imagine a world where they loop back together again, where Luis's conservation efforts in Mexico are successful. And a healthy population of wild axolotls is able to provide Randall's laboratory salamanders with some much needed genetic variation. Wow, that would be the ultimate, you know, happy ending. If what you just said could happen, that would be fantastic.
SPEAKER_02: But Randall and the other laboratory scientists that I spoke with were really clear that the dream of regrowing a human arm is not the reason we should protect this endangered species. They just don't want to live in a world where magical creatures like the axolotl cease to exist. After all, it was the magic of the natural world that got them interested in science in the first place. Jeremiah Smith might spend his days in a lab now, but growing up he used to search for tiger salamanders in the fields of Wyoming. And even now when he's not in the office, he's usually tramping around Kentucky with his kids, looking for amphibians. Not with the intent of collecting them or sampling them or doing any experiments or genetics.
SPEAKER_06: It's just sort of like to see them and appreciate them and then move on. Is there any, have you done it recently? Have you seen a salamander in the wild recently?
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, last weekend.
SPEAKER_06: It probably ended up going out this weekend again to see some other ones. Even as old as I am, I still really get a kick out of it.
SPEAKER_02: My Lenny was not a wild salamander. I didn't find her flipping over rocks in some pristine forest stream. But I got a kick out of her too. She was a sunny presence on my mantelpiece for over a year. And then without warning, she died in the night. I still don't know exactly what happened, although after talking to Randall and Jeremiah, I'm a little worried that it was probably my fault. Like most of her kind, Lenny lived her whole life in tanks. And so we decided to give her a sendoff befitting a water god. A proper Viking funeral. We built a raft out of clementine crates and laid her atop a pyre of shredded cereal boxes. I think there were at least seven people in attendance. I said a few words. My friend Will read a slightly too long Keats poem. Then we lit the makeshift boat on fire and pushed her out into the Narragansett Bay. For a second it looked like the wind was going to blow the boat back to shore, and it would smolder there awkwardly against the rocks. But then it changed directions and took Lenny out to sea.
SPEAKER_07: Coming up, Emmett and I talk about the possibility of resurrecting extinct species. After this. And the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices to their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal industrial and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit Article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's Article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. Okay, we're back with Emmet Fitzgerald. Hey, Emmet. Hello. And so you have another aspect of the story that you wanted to share. Yeah, so towards the end of my conversation with Jeremiah Smith, he brought up a kind of wild idea that I hadn't considered before. Basically, he told me that if the wild axolotl were to go extinct in Mexico City, he thinks he could bring it back.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, I guess there's this deeper question of like de-extinction, right?
SPEAKER_06: So are you familiar with this concept, de-extinction, Roman?
SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, I think I was made most familiar with it in the movie, in the book Jurassic Park. But that's basically what you're talking about, right?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, that's basically the gist of it. I mean, the idea is that like with modern gene editing techniques, we could recreate something that no longer exists in the wild or something very similar.
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, with Jurassic Park, the idea was like to profit off of that and to build a theme park. But, you know, when conservationists and conservation biologists are thinking about this, the idea would be that you would reintroduce that animal into the ecosystem where it quote unquote belongs. And so there's been, you know, real conversations are happening in the world of conservation biology around this. People have talked about trying to resurrect the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon and, you know, this relative of the zebra called the quagga. And is the notion that this is like a stunt as it was in Jurassic Park or is something actually valuable to, you know, ecology?
SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, there's a whole debate about this. Some people think it's like our duty to bring back species that we made extinct and others think it's a extravagant waste of resources.
SPEAKER_02: I don't want to get too into the debate, but the axolotl, you know, is sort of an interesting case study. It's not extinct yet. That's important to say. But if it were to happen in a way, it would be a better candidate to bring back than something that's been extinct for centuries because you have that population of laboratory axolotls. And Jeremiah thinks that if they could figure out exactly on a genetic level, like what are the differences between the lab axolotls and the wild ones, then they could basically back engineer a salamander from the lab population that was more like the wild ones and then release it into such a milko. We could probably generate and extract the information to sort of like make a more axolotl-y axolotl from the colony.
SPEAKER_06: What do you think about that?
SPEAKER_06: Well, I mean, you would hope you would never have to do it, right? It's like, I hope my house never burns down, but if it does burn down, well, then I'll probably rebuild it. It's, you know, you wouldn't want to do it, but if you had to do it, maybe you could.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. I mean, he seems like appropriately ambivalent about it, like being cautious and not just wanting to do it because you can, obviously the best way to do things is to conserve. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_06: But if it's the choices between not having wild axolotls and having wild axolotls, then I mean, I'm for it. I think it would be a good last ditch important thing to do for them. I mean, in a way it would be a way for the biomedical scientists to lend their knowledge and expertise, you know, to help bring back the animal in the wild, you know, like this is a way to reciprocate all that the axolotl has given us.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think that's right. And you know, one of the big critiques of this sort of thing over the years has been that humans are meddling too much in nature, that it feels like we're playing God. Right. I mean, that was certainly the narrative with Jurassic Park, that we deserve to be eaten by Tyrannosaurus Rex if we bring Tyrannosaurus Rex in the world.
SPEAKER_02: Right, right. That's like the role the Jeff Goldblum character is playing in the movie. It's like, you know, these arrogant humans think they can mess with nature sort of thing. Yeah. The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here staggers me.
SPEAKER_07: But you know, I do think like human impacts on the natural world are so obvious and omnipresent now that the concern, to my mind, the concern about playing God almost feels a little bit quaint, like we're already playing God, you know, destroying the lake system that was this animal's habitat, like that's playing God.
SPEAKER_02: Right. If we're going to play God, why don't we be a benevolent God?
SPEAKER_07: Right, right. Like, like at least we can try to do our best to do that. Yeah. I mean, I, I guess one thing that, you know, concern that I have personally with a concept like de-extinction and the axolotls a good example here is that like in situations like this, if you know you have the possibility of bringing an animal back, you could, you could really, I can see that people might begin to think, well, oh, well, we don't need to, you know, worry that much about that endangered animal.
SPEAKER_02: Um, that axolotl or, or whatever endangered animal we're talking about, because we always can just use their DNA to bring them back later on. Oh, totally. It creates a moral hazard. If you know that there's this kind of safety valve to stop extinction down the line, then it could, you know, encourage us to do bad things in the present. I totally agree with you.
SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And you know, when I was talking to Luis, like for him, it's as much about the health of the ecosystem at Xochimilco as it is about the axolotl on its own, you know, like he wants to save that animal because he wants to save the ecosystem that that animal is a part of.
SPEAKER_02: Um, and the interesting thing about, you know, this is like, even if you brought back the axolotl 50 years from now, it would still need a place to live. All those concerns are still relevant. You still need to have a healthy ecosystem to release that animal into. Absolutely. I mean, you could create thousands of, you know, de-extincted axolotls and introduce them into the valley and they would just die all over again. I mean, it's not like those conditions have changed that made them, you know, that make it poorer for axolotls.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And to my mind, you know, like de-extinction is interesting and I think it's like an interesting thing we should talk about, but it doesn't change the need to deal with the water quality and the invasive fish and the illegal development. Like if you want to have some place for a de-extincted salamander to go, you need to still work on those things. You need to make space in Mexico City for Mexico City's beloved salamander. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a good thing to have in our back pocket, but we have to fix everything else in addition to it. So, you know, but that's still a really fascinating science and it's, you know, an interesting thing to keep in mind as we're deciding what to do as the world changes, as the baseline shifts even more and more. Cool. Well, thank you, Emmet. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_07: Thank you.
SPEAKER_07: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmet Fitzgerald, mixed by Jim Briggs, music by our director of sound Sean Real. Delaney Hall is the executive producer. Kirk Colestead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivian Lay, Joe Rosenberg, Chris Berube, Christopher Johnson, Loshma Dawn, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks to Will Choffee. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99pi at 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_07: What do you call a baby axolotl? An axolotl. Stitcher or Sirius XM.
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