Stuff You Should KnowIt’s a listener request! Axolotls are one of the more amazing animals roaming the planet right now – they can regenerate parts of their brains, can fight off tumors, are found in the wild only in one single lake? And did we mention they smile all the time?
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's shock in Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you should know, part of the ongoing, never ending, stupendously outstanding animal editions.
That's right. And for us Friday morning edition, which never happens, we had a little family issue yesterday and you guys were very sweet and kind and sure agreed to punt to the recording a day, and so now we are. We're in our morning show routine.
That's right. I can't even begin to do a morning show host impression. I'd like to, but I can't bring myself.
To who likes lizards?
That was pretty good, Chuck, Yeah.
And that's probably a morning show person. We would probably call this a lizard.
Yeah, yeah, good point, because they're not lizards. They're amphibians. And what we're talking about are called ACXE Lottle's. And before we get into it, I think we should give a hat tip to a guest researcher who helped us with the very initial research on axeltos, a listener named Charlie's Flores, who, by the way, her grandma calls her Chuck, she mentioned.
Ah, that's very sweet. Did she send us a sweet letter in a picture that she drew?
Yes, a picture of her Axe Lottle Boba, And she told us some pretty amazing initial things about Axe Lottle's and she and her mom, Gabrielle listen out in Omaha. So thank you very much to Charlie's for helping us out with this one. I guess we should also thank Dave Ruths too.
Yeah, of course, but Dave's not what like six years old? How old is Chuck?
She's ten going into she just started the fifth grade.
Oh well, I feel like a dummy too. And I'm a dad of an eight year old, and I guess too young. You never know, You never know. You just can't tell at that age. You're like, are you three? Are you fifteen? I can't see?
Uh?
So should we talk pronunciation real quick? Because I, because of my screwy day yesterday, I meant a thousand times to go look up sort of the indigenous pronunciation of what we call axe Lottele, and I failed to. But you were schooling me before we started recording schooling in a good way.
I got you covered. Yeah, So that very strange looking word is actually taken directly from the naw What language, which is the language of the Aztec people, and they came up with this. We'll talk. Do you want to just go ahead and talk about that part now?
Yeah?
Sure, okay, good. So the the word axe a lottle, what we call acx a lotto, is actually as showlut, even though it's spelled the exact same way in the knaw What language, Atl is pronounced lut and x is very often pronounced show. It can also be pronounced waw. It's kind of all over the place. It's like a utility baseball player. It can do whatever.
Wow, look at you.
And by the way, also the Aztecs were called the mischika, and that x is a she in that case. So the ax a lottel or a show lut is named after the Aztec god show lut xolotl.
That's right, the god of fire and lightning.
Correct, also what else?
Also the god of physical deformities and dogs and death. And I'm glad we're starting here because this sort of reinforces why the ax a lottle, by the way, which is a very very cute little salamander amphibian. I think you did say amphibian, But if you think you haven't seen one, you probably have because of blown up the internet semi recently with their cute smiles. But they're very important to the lore and the culture of Mexico because of the Aztec origins and specifically this god show Lut, who, like we said, physical deformities, fire, lightning, death, and dogs.
Right, and so according to lore, Sholt was escaping Ketsukotl, which is Sholt's twin god sibling, and to escape he transformed into three things. May's plant, which is show lut in nowa language agave which is mesh mess show Lut, and then a salamander alt and he still was caught and killed. But I believe by transforming into those things he made them exist per chance. So the reason that the Asshola is kind of like a big deal in as tech culture is that they were very hyper local to the as tech people. They were where the as tech were, and they were a huge food source, a source of medicine, and also I guarantee a source of amusement and delight because I don't care what era or age or epoc you're living in. Yeah, Acxi Lotte's are one of the cutest animals on the planet.
They really are. I mean, there's something about that perma smile that is undeniably cute and affectionate looking. And I know this is humans putting their stuff on animals, but you know, the thing smiles. What else can you say?
You can't there's nothing I need to say. But that's the thing about Acxi Lottle's Chuck is, yes, if they were just that cute and it stopped there, they'd still be worth talking about. But they're really really worth talking about. And this what Charlie's Flores was trying to explain to us is that there's so many other amazing, astounding things about Axel Lotteles that this is just one of the most interesting animals on the planet.
It turns out, here's your Disney movie. It's centered around I'm surprised you haven't done this quite frankly, it's centered around and Axel Lottle.
Of course, na Axel.
But sure, yeah, exactly perfect, thank you, and it is, but it is. And you know, Disney movies always sort of and you know Pixar all that stuff, they always sort of have their larger point to make about emotions or this or that. Maybe this one deals with mental illness and you have an axe a lottle that is actually depressed but smiles all the time anyway, and his little buddies have to help him out and see him through this.
Yeah, and like the climax of the film is where he've manages to frown, right.
Maybe, so that's pretty great, chuck. Yeah, just to put a sort of cherry on top of the original cultural story. Though when the Spanish came around as conquerors, they were like, oh man, this stuff is delicious. It was. They tried to they tried to keep a lot of records at least of what was going on with the Aztec and like what was important to them culturally. I'm not going to say like so they could respect them or anything like that, but they did keep records, and they did learn about the axe lottle and learn that it was a source of medicine, and they called it the food of the lords, and there was there were festivals. It was this. I mean, I don't want to eat one of these things. But they had Tamali axe lottle, Tomaly's and I like it. Tomali. So That's the only time I was like, hmmm, I.
Could eat one of those if you wrapped it up into tamali.
Yeah, but I really couldn't because all I could see is that smile in my brain.
So axe Lottle's are that would be tough to do, especially if the head's poking out the end of the tamali just looking.
Oh man, no, you can't.
So I said. Axi Lottel's were hyper local to where the Mishika, the ASTech lived, uh. And they lived in uh like, basically on a lake. Like Mexico City used to be an az tech capital called tenock Teetlan, and tenak Teetlan was built basically on top of lake Uh. What is it Toshoko?
I think probably Teshcoco.
Toshcoco, thank you.
So.
Lake Toushcoco is where the the ax Lotto hails from. And it's again it's a salamander, and there are other salamanders that live in that area. But the axe Lotto only lived in the Lake Toshcoco area. And and as the Spanish came along and said, you can't build a city on a lake, what are you crazy, We're gonna go ahead and drain this lake. One of the remnants of that lake was an even smaller body of water. And it's not only a smaller body of water, it's it's even harder to pronounce than Lake Teshcoco.
It really is.
It's Lake Sochi Milko and friends. Look up Sochi Mealko. It is not, in any way, shape or form, as far as an English speaker is concerned, spelled like gets pronounced. Yeah, it's XO c Chi m I Lco. But Lake Sochi Mealko is a very small body of water. It's basically a small system of freshwater canals that are the remnants of Lake Teshcoco. And that is where x a Lotto's live. Now in the entire world, there's nowhere else, even in Mexico. There's nowhere else you will find an ax Lottel in the wild except for in Lake Sochi Milko.
Yeah, and I'm actually going to Mexico City for the first time in November.
It's a very cool town.
I can't wait. Man, And uh, I'm not going to go on an ax A Lottle tour. I don't know if they have those. I bet they do. They do, but they're they're generally not out during the day. But we'll get to all this stuff as we go, right, Should we start at the beginning?
Yeah, I thought we had started well.
Historically the beginning, I just mean the beginning of axe lottels as a species, because they are amphibians, like you said, of the order Urudella, and that is all salamanders. The scientific name is Ambistoma mexicanum, which very appropriate. I even know what that means. Ambostoma means blunt mouth, and when you see to axi lottle, it kind of has a blunt looking mouth, so it all makes sense. And in Latin, amphibia for amphibia means double life, and it's called double life and amphibia because, as we all know, amphibians start out in water when they're hatched as little eggs, and they spend some time there as young and swimming around and using their gills, and then eventually they metamorphosize and transform into a land creature, which means they grow legs, their little tails shrink, and they learn to use their lungs and those gills aren't useful anymore, and sometimes they even go all right.
Yes, that's a that's a typical amphibian. That's just what they do. Yeah, the gills go away, they start breathing with their lungs and they live on land. They go from living in the water living in the land. It's what makes an amphibian of an amphibian, except except with axe lottels and a couple other there's a couple other species of amphibians, mud puppies, I think, is one that they never leave the water. They're amphibians, but they don't amphibiate essentially. Yeah, and it's it's something called naotiny, which is they stay forever young, just like that Rod Stewart's song. Yeah, and another word for it is pedamorphic, and like Rod Stewart, yeah exactly. Although no, no, that's not true at all. But that means that they even in their adult form, even in like they're fully grown up, they can reproduce, they're drawing social security, they still are not only look like their childhood form for all intentsive purposes, their body inside and out is still in the childhood form.
Yeah, they don't drop that tail like other sallyes do. They keep that tails called a body fin because it kind of you know, once you see it, it kind of looks like it runs up their body. Yeah, they keep those well, they keep those legs. Their legs wouldn't go way anyway, but they have those stubby little legs. They do have lungs, and they also still have those gills, which we'll talk about a little more in a second, but they basically breathe almost exclusively through their gills and they also never use their legs to walk on dry land. So you know, there's a term in Mexico, Mexican walking fish is what they can be called, which Day very funnily points out, like they are Mexican, but they're not fish and they don't walk, so it's a bit of a misnomer.
Yeah, just a touch. There's a theory as to why this is going on, like why would this happen? This doesn't really make any sense.
Like why would they have legs?
Yeah, exactly, that's a great question. And some one of the theories is that there was a point in time where they did amphibiate fully and make it out of the water, so they needed their legs, they needed their lungs. They do have little tiny lungs, but they're very undeveloped, so they can't they can survive out of water for a very short time with those little tiny lungs, but not for very long. They're clearly not designed to stay out of water. So the idea is that somewhere in their evolutionary history they spent some time on land. But the place where they lived, either like Tushcoco or Lake Sochi Milko, was so such a great environment for them, so ripe, with food so abundant. No, what's the opposite of abundant, Oh, scarce? So there was such scarce predators. It was just a perfect place to live man, a golden age to be an Axi lotto, I would say. And so they stayed in the water, and at some point in time those genes got frozen in some individual organisms, and those got passed along, and those gave us Axi lottos and chuck also, may, I retort to myself. Sure, So that is one theory. My theory which I would like to share is wow, Axi lottles are only about ten thousand years old as a species. Okay, they basically evolve from other salamanders that they live among, and they haven't fully I believe, evolved into it an entirely separate species. They can still procreate with other salamanders, and so I think what it is, it's a remnant of the salamanders that they evolved from. That they haven't fully evolved out of that, and that if you looked at Axi lottles, you know, one hundred thousand years from now, they won't have any legs anymore.
And this is, uh, does anyone is this out there at all? Is this all you?
I'm putting it out there, baby?
Okay? So they used to mate with their other salamander friends.
And they still can. Like Rod Stewart, that's right, that's right, he's had one or two salamanders in this time.
All right, I like it. That makes sense to me.
Thank you.
In one hundred thousand years, we'll know for sure, right right. Yeah, once the earth is a big flaming ball of hot gas.
Oh yeah, it'll have come and gone by then.
All right, So maybe we should take a break. I think that's a good setup and we talk about how remarkable this thing is. Just hold on to your hats, everybody, because this sort of blew my mind and it will blow yours as well. Right after this, soft jaws.
Want to learn about terrors or color sord Actol, how to take a perfect boom?
All about fractalink is con that's a little hunt the Lizzie Borderers A.
Word up, Jerry.
All right, So, uh, if you haven't looked up a picture of an axe lottle, by now, pull your car off or take a break from jogging or cleaning your house or whatever you do when you listen to us. Wake up. Maybe if you're sleeping, look up a picture of that cute little thing. You've probably seen them on TikTok or YouTube. Uh, you've probably seen a bunch of very colorful axe lottles. And those are bread specifically to sell as pets in those amazing colors. That is not what color they are in the wild. They are dark brownish, sort of greenish or really really black. And kids don't want that. Kids want a hot, pink one, and so humans have made that possible, right.
They want the Barbie version of ax lottles, the Barbie edition.
We all do we want what Barbie versions of everything, don't we?
Yeah? For sure? So there's pink and the pink can it's usually pretty pale, but I would say their faces can be kind of hot pink. Yeah, white ones pale yellow lavender. That's my favorite model, green gray. And they also have glow in the dark ones, which are a little bit misname because it's not glow in the dark. They glow under UV lights because they have the same genes that jellyfish. Some jellyfish do and they were bred into them. This is not a natural thing, although apparently they can spontaneously generate that gene in the wild weirdly enough. But the upshot of it is if you have a glow in the dark axilotel and you're showing it off with the black light how it glows, you actually don't want to do that very much because you're blasting them with UV radiation and their skin is so delicate. It's actually really bad for them.
Yeah, and if you're a teenage boy and your mom's in the room, you don't want to do that anyway.
Right, What do you mean I'm not catching that one?
That's right. Adults will understands. Moving on, They are about ten inches long, or they can grow up to ten inches long. They have those big, wide mouths that look sort of unusually large for their size and for their head, and they do have little teeth top and bottom, teeth and their stubby little legs have four web toes on the front and five on the rear. And we got to talk about those gills, because the first thing you might notice, aside from that winning smile when you look at an Axi lotto, are those amazing feathery gills sticking out from the head. They don't look like fish's gills that you would see, just sort of, you know, just like dumb old gills on the side of a fish head, just opening back and forth like an air vent. These things are, as Dave says, magnificent. There's no other to describe these wispy, feathery, branched feathers.
It almost looks like little pieces of coral coming off of it. There's three, three pair on each side of its head. Now there's a pair on each side of its head, times three, right, Yeah, Okay, Chuck, no more Friday morning recording sessions for me.
Okay, that was some tough mess.
And they look like flowy and branched and philigreed because they're essentially like our lungs. Our lungs have avoli, these air sacs, and if you really look at a detail of our lungs, they're branched in feathery and philigreed because that expands the surface area for gas exchange. Same thing with the axe lottel, except those are gills to them because they do the oxygen exchange of the gas exchange under water. And they're on their head.
Yeah, and it's it looks like an adornment almost, you know, or a hair do.
Like a Larry Fine hairdo from the Three Stooges.
Right, it's cuterer than that.
I think Larry's hair was super cute.
Okay, As I mentioned earlier, I kind of teased about an Axi lottle tour in Mexico City. I'm not sure how they do those, but they are generally not around during the day. They're pretty sedentary and they hide in the mud. Nighttime is the right time for the Axi lotte They come out and eat basically anything that they can eat their carnivores, anything with a beating heart, whether it's a worm or a mollusk, or even a crustacean or a tiny fish, an Axi lotta will chow down on them. And you mentioned earlier that they can even though they never go through that metamorphosis that other amphibians do in order to live a life on land and do things like reproduce. They can reproduce. They are sexually mature at six months old, and they're just it's called the peter Pan state. They're sort of stuck in this eternal childhood. But those children still want to have babies and do that thing, you know.
Yeah, So how do they do it?
Well, like many animals, there's a little dancing ritual. It's called the mating waltz where the male and the female kind of swim very tightly together. They get their cloacas and rub them against each other. Things are getting a little steamy down there in the lake, and then the male says, here you go, here's a big cone full of sperm. And the female says, well, thank you very much. I we'll use my cloaca to accept that be whip and fertilize my eggs. And those eggs are a lot. They are about three hundred to one thousand fertilized eggs. What I wondered is how, I mean, I know, we'll talk about why they're so endangered, but if they're laying that many eggs, how many come to fruition? Because that's a lot of eggs.
I got you. I found on some message boards. I don't even know if they call them that any longer, but on the internet from people who raise acxilatos that they're actually they a lot of them do, like more than a than half. It was a news serve. Oh wow, they they I saw somebody predict about eighty percent. Well hatch, which is a big deal. If you have a female and a male Acxi lotel in your tank, you really have to keep an eye out for eggsacs floating around because those you'll have a lot of acxi lottos on your hands.
Yeah, and they if you get one as a pet, and we'll talk about care a little bit at the end, but be prepared to have that thing for a while because in captivity they can live up to twenty five years. In the wild about ten to fifteen. And if you remember our we talked about the proteus alemander a long time ago.
In our biosbiology episode.
That's right, that was a good creepy episode. Those things can live to be one hundred so it's not unusual for a sally to have a long life.
Yeah, and like you said, in captivity up to twenty five years, And I just want to make sure that everybody who's buying Acxi lottos as pets these days knows that, like, you're twenty five years, you're going to have graduated college and had your first job and maybe even have a kid while your axilout is still around. So keep that in mind.
Well, in the Disney movie, maybe that's why the excel suppress that might be a little too toy story that the kid sort of doesn't care anymore, but hey, you never know.
Yeah, and we couldn't do that they flushed him down the toilet because that's like finding Nemo, right, Hmmm.
Is that how Nemo got back into the wild?
I feel like that happened the summer at some point. I could be making that up, though it.
Isn't drifted in and out of some of those, you.
Know, it's just sooned out.
Well, I mean a lot of those I really like. But then you know, when you have a kid, you're watching so many Sometimes you're working and you know you know Nemo's down there, but you don't remember how he got there. You know.
I liked finding Nemo overall, but okay, moment to moment, I didn't like that movie very much.
But the whole is greater than the sum of its tissue.
Party, yes, yeah, well put well, put all.
Right, all right, so we haven't blown your mind yet. Everyone's like, all right, they don't metamor size not the biggest deal in the world, guys. Here's where the mind blowing stuff comes in. Overall, salamanders and newts can regrow stuff. They can regenerate tissue. They can regrow a tail. We all know that they can regrow a limb. That's fine, and they come out usually okay. But the axe a lodel can well you know what I should read, actually what Stephanie Roy says. This is a researcher from the University of Montreal.
Can you do your Stephanie Roy impression while you read it?
Sure, here we go. You can cut the spinal cord, she sounds a lot like me. You can cut the spinal cord, crush it, remove a segment and it will regenerate. You can cut the limbs at any level, the wrist, the elbow, the upper arm. This all sounds very sadistic, by the way, and it will regenerate and it's perfect. There's nothing missing, there's no scarring on the skin. At the side of amputation, every tissue is repla. They can regenerate the same limb fifty sixty one hundred times parentheses. Trust me, I've cut off a lot of legs of exilotis in parentheses and every time perfect.
Yeah. And what's crazy is like this continues throughout their life. Like they can do this when they're very young, they can do it when they're very old. Apparently. The only change is that it just takes longer the older they are. But that that new leg, that that new tail, it's as good as new every time, no matter how old they are. And that's pretty mind blowing in and of itself. It gets even crazier than that.
Chuck that's here.
In addition to like extremities and limbs and tails and stuff, they can do the same thing with organs. Yeah, and like important organs too, like the heart and the brain and their spinal cord. They can regrow it good as new every time.
Yeah, it's really amazing. And if you think they should study this stuff to see if humans, you know, could potentially do something like this with a little help from ax a lot of stuff, right, they are studying this stuff because and they've already found some pretty good breakthroughs, but Axi lottels are very very valuable to study. And what they've learned so far as far as these limbs go and other things, is you get that little limb cut off or something, and the cells nearest to that limb wound differentiate immediately, so that means it's sort of like a stem cell. That means they can become any type of cell kind of instantaneously, and they form a little a little pile around these undifferentiated cells, and that's called a blastema. Or then this helps you to visualize it more, it's also called a regeneration bud. So it's like a little plant butd or something. Basically, we scar up like dummies. We form scar like cut off your arm and you're going to start forming scar tissue. Axe Lott's say no, no, no, we're going to grow that thing back with this blastoma, and they do that. They generate stem cells, bone cells, muscle nerves, whatever you need to replicate perfectly whatever is now missing.
Yeah, which is pretty amazing considering we have pretty much the same genes we've figured out the Axi Lottel So they sequenced an Axi Lottal genome in twenty eighteen. I believe it's the largest genome ever sequenced because amazing, the Axi Lottal's genome is second only to the Australian lungfish in size and number of base pairs. Humans have three billion base pairs. We're doing pretty good with three billion base pairs is kind of to be expected. That's a lot. Axi Lotte's have ten almost eleven times the number of base pairs that humans do, thirty two billion base pairs in their genome. And so after examining all this, scientists said like, hey, we've got some of these genes. What's different They think is that with axe lotels, those genes are stuck in the on position. Either they never make the hormone that would turn those genes off, or they continue to produce the hormone that keeps those genes on regardless the fact that those genes are turned on and then makes them able to just regrow like brand new every time throughout their life.
Yeah, it's really something else. There's another cool theory about why this might be true evolutionarily speaking, and there are scientists that think that maybe at one point in their history when they were in that lake and they were landlocked, and food may have been abundant at one time, but maybe at one point there were too many Acxi lottels and food wasn't as abundant, and so they may have turned cannibalistic and said, hey, friend, no, we've been hanging out a lot lately, but your rear leg is looking pretty tasty to me, and so I'm just going to bite that off and eat it if you don't mind. And that happened so much that the axe A lottos who thrived were the ones who could grow those limbs back quicker and survive.
Yeah, which makes sense, not bad. I don't have a rival theory for that one.
Ah.
Shoot, I could make one up real quick. No, I can't. It's Friday morning. Maybe if it were a Thursday afternoon.
But I know.
So you might say, like, oh, that's cool. I want to try this at home with my ax a lot I'm going to cut off its right front leg and half of its brain and see what happens. Please don't don't because they do have pain receptors, so they can't feel pain. Apparently they have a high threshold pain, but they will still feel pain if you essentially torture them for your own amusement. So don't do that to your axe a lottle at home. And by the way, is these aren't messages to Charlie's flooras because based on her her preliminary research, she knows what she's doing. She's taking good care of Boba totally.
Another amazing superpower that these little guys have is the you know, not only can they grow back things and grow back organs, but they can transplant organs perfectly, just like they can grow things back. They don't have a learned immune system like we do when you get and we did an episode on organ transplant many years ago, and as we all know, a lot of times, in fact, about a third of the time, the human body will reject the organ because we have a learned immune system and we'll just say, no, this isn't, this isn't shouldn't be on my body. Yeah, get this thing out of here. But axe lottos don't have that, so you can transplant. It's like one hundred percent non rejection rate for organ transplants.
Yeah, but I mean that's for axe lottel. Right, You couldn't put like a pig heart in it or anything.
I don't think they've tried, but probably you're right, I would say.
I don't know if we said it or not. But the different kinds of like lab grown types and varieties of ax lottols are called morphs. Did you say that. So there's a type of morph called the firefly morph. And when it's in the embryonic stage, they'll take if it's a like a black or dark modeled Axi lottle, they'll take a tail from a white axe lotto or pink one, and vice versa, and they will transplant the tail in the embryonic stage and the thing grows up and it's like black with a white tail or white with a black tail. I don't think it's very cool looking, but I think some people do.
Yeah. Another superpower is that they are one thousand more times resistant to cancer than other mammals. It's pretty amazing. And again researchers are studying this because like, could the cure for cancer potentially be in these cute little sallies And you know, you never know. They have treated breast cancer patients with Axi loottle egg serum and it halted the growth of cancerous tumors. So you know, know.
Yeah, they looked into it and they think what happened was that the axe Lottle juice reprogrammed the tumor suppressing genes that had been turned off epigenetically went in and turned it back on, and so the tumor fighting proteins and hormones were able to fight that tumor and stop it from growing. Wow. Yeah, Wow is right, And I say that big wow calls for a message break. What do you think? I agree, Stoff we Josh Soft.
I want to learn about a terroristort in college Taradactyl, how to take the berg bo all about rectalink is gone.
That's a little hunt the Lizzie Borderers on the plane. Everything should know.
Word up, Jerry, so Chuck. There's a big irony with ax. Aside from the irony that they can reproduce even though they're young and YadA YadA, they are critically endangered in the wild because again there's one small, tiny body of water in outside of Mexico City where they live, and they live nowhere else in the wild, But there's countless accil Lottels thriving and living in captivity. Because it was very clear early on in the mid nineteenth century to at least some French physicians that they would make great lab animals to experiment and test on. And so they took some sample Acxi lottels to France and from that point on they just kept breeding them and breeding them and breeding them. Another world has tons of Acxi lottels, they're just not around in the wild much.
Yeah, big time. You know, we talked about the habitat loss. There's also a pollution problem. Also, the government introduce carp i believe in Tilapia into where the axilottos were into that lake and you know it for a food source basically for fishermen, but they eat the plants where the axil lottles like eggs. So that was a problem. And here's some numbers for you. In nineteen ninety eight there were about six thousand Axi lottles per square kilometer and that is down to thirty five three five per square kilometer today, which is very dead.
Yeah, and again critically endangered. And one of the reasons why there's so many in captivity. I was saying is that they do make a great lab animal. Apparently they're experimented on second or third only to rats and mice. Wow, yeah, that's surprising. That must be as far as vertebrates go. But they that's where the pink Axi lottels come from and all the other specimens. Apparently there were there was what are called lucistic axi lottels. They're almost oh buy I no, not quite, but they were in that group of thirty four X lottels that were first taken into Paris. And so every pink axe lotte is descended from those. I think there are like six original ones. But the reason that they work so well in labs is that they have some really interesting traits.
Yeah, they are very easy to breed in captivity. They are easy to keep alive.
If you know what you're doing.
Check sure, because we said, you know, they live a long time. Apparently they have very big cells and they're easy to look at and easy to examine. And I think the eggs are thirty times larger than a.
Human, roughly the size of a beach ball.
They're embryonic neurons are six hundred times larger.
What's that it's the size of the Grand Canyon.
Okay in big max. Sorry, right, And you know they're they're just ideal model organisms for the lab, and so that's why, and you know, because of their superpower, that's why they are studied a lot.
Yeah, so we found a few things from them already. We've figured out how organs develop invertebrates, including us, because, like I said, we realized when we scan their genome that we have a lot of the same genes. We use those genes to grow limbs ourselves and lose our tails ourselves while we're in utero, but after we're born, probably right before we're born, those genes get turned off. So we've figured out, thanks to the Axil Lottel how those genes work and which ones are important. We figured out how spina bifido works and where it comes from. And thyroid hormones you wanted those isolated Axi Lotte's got you covered.
Yeah, it's pretty amazing. If you're in did you already say that the fact that they're growing like tons and tons of these in a lab doesn't mean you can just throw them back in a lake because they have a shortage.
There, right, I did not say that.
Well, I just said it because that's what I was thinking this whole time. I was researching. It was well, why then, since they are critically endangered, can't you just release you know, tens of thousands of these But it just doesn't work that way. These morphs are bred for the lab, they're not bread for that lake, and it apparently just doesn't work.
It'd be like moving your city cousin in with your country cousin. Like you might have a decent sitcom on your hands, but it's only going to last a season or two, that's right.
It all falls apart on Super Tuesdays exactly.
So yeah, they can't do that. That's not to say that they won't find a place where they could introduce them to the wild. It's just apparently taking them back to where they're from or where they originated is not on the table.
Yeah. And if you're wondering, well, what are they doing, they are trying because the axe lotel is such a culturally important thing, scientifically important animal. It is a flagship species that they designated i think semi recently, which which helps obviously protect it. They are now building sheltered areas that don't have those grass eating tilapia. They're blocking them out so they can lay those eggs safely. Where they had for you know, eons. Actually, how long is an eon? I probably misuse that. I don't know.
Let's say, I'm sure I'll get any pretty long time, Okay, pretty long time.
The tour guides and the locals have all been you know, educated and trained on best practices for like fishing and doing those tours, and you know, hopefully all that stuff makes a difference and really sinks in because it is a beloved cultural creature.
So beloved in fact, chuck that. In twenty twenty, Mexico said, hey, everybody, check out our new fifty payso bill. And everybody's like, oh, it's pretty cool, all right, And then they said no, no, turn it over, right, and everybody turned it over. They're like, there's an axe lottle on the back of the fifty payso bill. Now Mexico's government said, yep, cool.
Yeah, every time they do that trick, they put it on the wrong side and just say, watching this, yeah exactly, I tell them to turn it over. It kills.
What's funny is the axe lottel appears to be floating above the water weirdly. Yeah, it's a strange jam, but it's cute as a button. On the back of the fifty payso.
Bill, Yeah, I agree, and also shout out to Minecraft. Uh, that's a game that my daughter's obsessed with now, as many young EN's are. And there is an axe Lottel in Minecraft.
Okay, I couldn't figure this out. What's a mob in Minecraft? It seems to be referred to like an individual thing.
I don't know, okay, apparently no, I don't play, so I don't know. Okay, fair enough, you like, but do you talk to your daughter?
And I'm curious though, ask her and let me know, will you? Yeah?
Yeah, I'll just she can text you now.
Oh yeah, tell her to text me what a mob is?
All right? She does have a phone, but she does have a little email address, so it's cute text her friends occasionally. She does have thumb and she does have thumbs and they work pretty well. Get ready for lots of memes.
By the way, what do you mean, Oh, she's gonna send me if your okay? Does she have the good ones?
I don't even know how to get a meme in a text. I have no idea. And the first thing she did was send me like sixty in a row.
It's copy and paste buddy.
I know, but I don't even know where to find them.
Oh that's a big first step.
Yeah, I'm not going to give you your phone number. You'll your life will change, and not in a great way.
Okay, well, then send me screenshots of her texts to you. Then all right, leave me out of it.
Sorry.
So Mexico City in twenty seventeen said, hey, let's have an emoji contest because, as as is the case with cities these days, every city has to have its own official emoji. And guess what the emojis are based on in Mexico City to Molly's with the ax Lottle head sticking out of the Oh no, no, just ax Lottle doing stuff.
That's great. Love it. So before we finish up, you found some good stuff about ax A Lottle care. We are not experts, but you did find some stuff. Where did you find this?
I'll have to tell you in a moment.
But go ahead, okay, And again you should you know, if you're getting into the ax A Lottle game, as pat wise, do all your own research. Don't just listen to the next you know, five minutes and think I got it covered. This is just sort of a broad overview, right, right.
Yeah, So there's a few things that you need to remember with ax a lottles. There very sensitive to water temperature and water quality. Obviously you want to start with fresh water, but you want to start with filtered freshwater to begin with. But you can't just put fresh water in there and say hey, it's all good, get in there, ax a lottle. You want to tweak it enough so that the ax a lottle can be happy and thrive in there.
Yeah. You also want to get a fish net. You don't want to handle as much as you might want to pet this thing. They have very sensitive skin. It's very easily damaged, and so you don't want to pick the thing up or pettit or anything like that. So get out your little fish net when you're changing water and stuff like that, and feed them a lot. Right.
Yes, you want to feed them live stuff if possible, especially when they're young, because they actually have a prey a predator response, so it's got to be moving for them to be like, oh that's food. They can eat dead stuff later on as they get older, but you want to also be very selective. Don't go out and like save some money and harvest your own bloodworms. If you even know how to do that. You want to buy them from a reputable bloodworm dealer, which you can find basically on any corner in any talent in America. Sure, But the reason why is because those things are typically like disease free parasite free, and if they aren't, those can basically make your axe a little sick.
That's right. You don't want to do that. When tank shopping too, you also want to and this is true with any fish, and I think a common mistake is that you don't get the right size tank and habitat. For whatever it is, they need a little bit of room. So a twenty gallon aquarium is what they recommend for like just one single Axi Lottel. If you want more than one, they say you really shouldn't do that. You should just have one. You don't get five or six because you think it's five or six times as cute. But if you are some sort of professional aquarium type and you do want to house more than one, then that tank has to grow, you know, proportionally.
Yeah. The other thing I was saying about the water, you need to tweak it. You want to keep your water temperature between sixty and sixty four degrees farent height. Go figure it out yourself. For Celsius and the pH you want somewhere between six point five and eight, but ideally about seven point four to seven point six, which is basically right in there at neutral. They like neutral fresh water at sixty to sixty four degrees farent height.
That's right. And they aren't like fish. You can't just throw like fish gravel in there. And oh that's a big way. They need their own really specific habitat the substrate. And you know, little shards of gravel can really really harm an axi lottle it can. They tend to just sort of gulp down water and in that water could be little tiny shards of gravel. So maybe loose sand could be a foundation. Definitely, don't just think. Get a fish tank and fish tank stuff and it'll work for your axe a lot.
Yeah, And some people say, well, I'm just not going to put anything down. They can just leave the bottom of the tank bear, which your ax a lotta won't cut their skin on anything. But they'll also be freaked out because everything's so slippery. So sand is a good thing. And they also can burrow into sand if they're nervous or scared or want to sleep too. That's right, there's a lot more out there. By the way, that was from the Atlantic City Aquarium. They know what they're talking talking about, and you should probably do a lot more research before you actually get your ax A Lottle and set its tank up.
Okay, that's right. And also now since we are wrapping this up, this means that we can go listen to the ninety nine percent Invisible Episode Model Organism, which also covers the ax A Lottle. But Dave, who helped us with this, was like, don't listen to that first, because you're just gonna want to steal it all because Roman and the gang there does they do such a great job and they have forever and Roman as a friend of the show, and I can't wait to go listen to it. I'm sure it's amazing here.
Well, thanks to Roman for making that amazing episode, Thanks to Charlie's Flores and her mom Gabrielle for sending in that preliminary research. Thanks to Dave for helping us out, and thanks to you for listening. Since I thank you guys for listening and Chuck just said okay, tacitly by his silence, that means it's time for listener mail.
That's right. And also thanks to Charlie's their own sure and Rod Stewart, we got shout out. I mean we have been picking on him. I was just watching the videos of old Sir Rod. Is he a sir?
I believe?
So?
Yeah, sir, thanks for being such a great sport rotten.
Uh all right, I'm gonna call this one. Which one should I do? I'll do this one. I'll call this bede bed.
Oh man, what's wrong? I wanted to go the rest of my life without correcting that.
Well. Sorry, Uh hey guys, longtime listener of stuff you should know from uh Wollongong, Australia.
Okay, Wallongong, I guarantee that's not how it's pronounced.
Wal I gong all you have to do to be Australian to sound surprise at everything while I go.
I think that was a New Zealand accent too.
By the way, probably hey guys, heard your podcast and how the English language developed and have to correct your pronunciation of b E. Saint b d E is a famous Catholic saint who was a learned scholar from the Jarro area of northern England. He's famous for writing a history of the English speaking people in English as opposed to Latin. I think he also had something to do with the change to the calendar and using BC and AD and prefixes for dates before and after the birth of Jesus. Now this is something deserving of a separate so if you should know topic one day. Anyway, as I am named after him, I can assure you that the pronunciation of his name is the same as Bead.
Is that a disappointment, Yes, that's a disappointment, but I'm not even convinced. I mean, that's what Bed says.
Well, Beide says, I've long had to put up with people mispronouncing my name Bead Bead I and could you die. Well, that's what he says, and could not help but correct your attempts to get his name right. Keep up the great work. Cheers that is from Bade Richie.
Thanks a lot, Beatty or Bead. I will call you Bead because you said that's how your name is pronounced. But this doesn't necessarily mean by extension unless you have a time machine handy that I don't know about that Beatie's name wasn't pronounced.
Beatie auh greedy.
Uh. Well, if you want to get in touch with this like bad did, thanks a lot. By the way, Bead, you can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
