Reptiles & amphibians · plate 47 of 60
Axolotl
Ambystoma mexicanum
Never grew up. Regrew everything else instead.
Only 0.3% of people are Axolotls. (estimated)
If you're an Axolotl
You never finished becoming the thing you were supposed to become, and you are fine with that; the half-finished version works. You stay in one small place, do very little, and recover from almost anything. People find you unbothered to the point of eeriness. You look like you are smiling. You are not, particularly. That is just your face.
An axolotl can regrow a lost leg, its tail, parts of its spinal cord and heart, and even portions of its brain, without scarring.
The Axolotl as a spirit animal
You are resilient in a way that looks like laziness from the outside: nothing much knocks you down because you were never standing up. You stay where you are, you let the world come to you, and you heal from what it does. The flaw is that staying unfinished is comfortable, and comfort keeps you in one lake. An axolotl's whole wild range is a handful of canals, and it has never asked about the rest.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with an Axolotl
Do
- Keep things cool, calm and dim; bright lights and sudden movement are not their medium.
- Visit them; they will not be coming to you.
- Let them heal at their own pace, which is slow and total.
Don't
- Don't try to make them grow up. It takes hormones they don't have.
- Don't take the smile as consent to anything.
When it goes wrong: An axolotl under stress curls its tail and stops eating; reduce the noise, give it space and wait; it regrows what it loses.
The Axolotl in a relationship
You love without urgency. You are not going anywhere, and you would like a partner who understands that staying is a form of commitment. You are tender, oddly, and you recover from heartbreak more completely than most people recover from a cold. Courtship, for you, is a slow dance in shallow water.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 1
- Boldness
- 1
- Energy
- 1
- Curiosity
- 4
- Devotion
- 0
- Roaming
- 0
- Axolotls stay larval all their lives, keeping their feathery gills and living in water, and breed in that form.
- Given a dose of thyroid hormone, an axolotl will metamorphose into a land-dwelling salamander it was never going to be otherwise.
- In the wild it survives only in the canals of Lake Xochimilco in Mexico City, and is critically endangered there.
Axolotls in literature
- Xolotl — Florentine Codex, Bernardino de Sahagún (1577)
- Sir Isaac Newton the newt — The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, Beatrix Potter (1906)
- The salamander — History of Animals, Aristotle (350 BCE)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Axolotl's. If you got Axolotl, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other reptiles & amphibians
Among the 60
Popular Science Monthly, Popular Science Monthly (1882). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
