noun
definition
A critically endangered salamander found in the elevated lakes of Mexico, Ambystoma mexicanum.
Examples of axolotl in a Sentence
Now it has been stated that in the lakes near Mexico City, where it was first discovered, the axolotl never transforms into an Amblystoma.
When once sexually ripe the axolotl are apparently incapable of changing, but their ancestral course of evolution is still latent in them, and will, if favoured by circumstances, reappear in following generations.
Gadow during his visit to Mexico in the summer of 1902, we are now better informed on the conditions under which the axolotl lives near Mexico City.
At the same time, in the Jardin des Plantes, the single female axolotl also spawned, twice in succession, and a large number of young were successfully reared.
Nevertheless, in the axolotl the latent tendency can still be revived, as we have seen above and as is proved by the experiments of Marie von Chauvin.
This is the Amblystoma into which the axolotl has been ascertained to transform.
Before reviewing the history of these discoveries, it is desirable to say a few words of the characters of the axolotl (larval form) and of the Amblystoma (perfect or imago form).
The axolotl has been known to the Mexicans from the remotest times, as an article of food regularly brought from neighbouring lakes to the Mexico market, its flesh being agreeable and wholesome.
This may be also true of some of those instances that have occurred among frogs, in Proteus, and with an axolotl once possessed by the present writer.
Lake Xochimilco contains powerful springs, but away from them the water appears dark and muddy, full of suspended fresh and decomposing vegetable matter, teeming with fish, larvae of insects, Daphniae, worms and axolotl.
The axolotl is a salamander, and many of the fundamental discoveries in vertebrate embryology came from studies of axolotl embryos.
Francisco Hernandez (1514-1578) has alluded to it as Gyrinus edulis or atolocatl, and as lusus aquarum, piscis ludicrus, or axolotl, which latter name has remained in use, in Mexico and elsewhere, to the present day.
This the present writer is inclined to doubt, considering that he has received examples of the normal Amblystoma tigrinum from various parts of Mexico, and that Alfred Duges has described an Amblystoma from mountains near Mexico City; at the same time he feels very suspicious of the various statements to that effect which have appeared in so many works, and rather disposed to make light of the ingenious theories launched by biological speculators who have never set foot in Mexico, especially Weismann's picture of the dismal condition of the salt-incrusted surroundings which were supposed to have hemmed in the axolotl - the brackish Lago de Texcoco, the largest of the lakes near Mexico, being evidently in the philosopher's mind.