Axolotl, The Best Pet Amphibian?

Did you know these animals make for good students? Because they axolotl questions!

My daughter has two axolotls and absolutely LOVES them. In opposition to most "expert advice" found online, we have them in a fully planted, naturalistic 40 gallon aquarium with sand, mud, and a section of a waterlogged limb from a willow tree. We have the tank externally filtered and oxygenated to keep ahead of the ammonia build up (which is the only challenging part of keeping axolotls) I hate seeing these creatures in glass boxes with plastic plants. In the wild ( when they still lived in the wild ) axolotls lived on muddy/sandy stream beds surrounded by thick plants and organic debris. My daughter's axolotls seem to love moving through the plants looking for guppies and worms.

As somebody who works with history/archeology channels, 9:40: the root problem that led to the current habitat issues is actually the Siege of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. Really! Historically, the Valley of Mexico, what's now the Greater Mexico City metropolitan area was large network of 5 interconnected lakes, and was a major population center for Mesoamerican civilizations: When Mesoamerica was first developing cities and complex societies and writing around 1400-900BC, Tlatilco was a major town in the Valley with influence from the Olmec civilization on the gulf coast. By the turn of the Millenium around 100BC-0AD, the valley had a number of towns and cities, most notably Cuicuilco and Teotihuacan. A volcanic eruption devastated the former, causing the latter to receive displaced people and leading to it growing to be one of the largest cities in the world, with 100,000 denizens, a massive, 20~ square kilometer urban grid, widespread ecnomic and cultural influence (maybe even conquering Maya city-states 1000km away, and having very unusual urban design traits for the region, as well as basically all it's denizens living in fancy palace compounds, ethnic-neighborhoods with people from Maya, Zapotec, Gulf Coast, and West Mexican cultures, and may have been a democracy due to those + us not finding royal tombs or iconography. I helped on an excellent video on the Ancient Americas channel all about the city I highly recommend. Anyways, after Teotihuacan's decline, around the 1200s AD, you had various Nahuatl speaking nomadic people migirating from above Mesoamerica and settling down in Central Mexico, including in and around the Valley, and adopting local city-building, statehood, etc. It was these Nahua city-states and kingdos that gave rise to the Aztec Empire, after a series of conflicts and successon disputes, where the cities of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan worked together to overthrow their captial of Azcapotzalco in 1428. Tenochtitlan was built on an island in the middle of the largest lake, Lake Texcoco, and over time, grew and expanded via artificial islands called Chinampas, which were basically used around the lake basin as a way to create more usable land around shorelines for agriculture (where they acted as hyper-efficiend hydroponic farms that didn't interfere with the local ecology) or for residential space. Between the Chinampas, there would be canals, so the whole city, and portions of other cities (the valley at this point had around 50 other major cities, and hundreds of towns and villages, with 1 to 2 million people) around the lakes, were basically all on the water with canals cutting through them, like Venice. Causeways connected Tenochtitlan and other towns/cities on other islands to the shorelines, with aquaducts running through them, and there were other levee/dam and water management systems. At it's apex, Tenochtitlan covered 13.5 square kilometers, around the area that Rome's walls encompassed, and by most estimates, it had around 200,000 denizens, in the same ballpark as the population of the largest cities in contemporary Europe like Paris and Constantinople, with hundreds of palaces, temples, gardens, a royal zoo (which even had a Bison brought in from thousands of kilometers aqay, and we've found remains of jaguars found have healed wounds from surgeries preformed on them from Aztec zookeepers!), aquarium, aviary, and gardens (The Aztec also had formal taxonomy for plants and flowers, and some royal gardens had different sections to emulate different climates and biomes) Here's a short description of the city from the Conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo: "Our astonishment was indeed raised to the highest pitch... all these buildings resembled the fairy castles we read of in Amadis de Gaul; so high, majestic, and splendid did the temples, towers, and houses of the town, all built of massive stone and lime, rise up out of the midst of the lake... many of our men asked if what they saw was a mere dream... it is impossible to speak coolly of things which we had never seen nor heard of, nor even could have dreamt of, beforehand... After we had sufficiently gazed upon this magnificent picture, we again turned our eyes toward the great market, and beheld the vast numbers of buyers and sellers who thronged there. The bustle and noise... was so great that it could be heard at a distance of more than four miles. Some of our men, who had been at Constantinople and Rome, and travelled through the whole of Italy, said that they never had seen a market-place of such large dimensions, or which was so well regulated, or so crowded with people" And here is him describing some palace/villa complexes at Iztapalapa, a smaller city nearby "We were indeed quartered in palaces, of large dimensions, surrounded by spacious courts, and built of hewn stone, cedar and other sweet-scented wood. All the apartments were hung round with cotton cloths... After we had seen all this, we paid a visit to the gardens adjoining these palaces, which were really astonishing... walking about in them and contemplating the numbers of trees... the rose bushes, the different flower beds, and the fruit trees which stood along the paths. There was likewise a basin of sweet water, which was connected with the lake by means of a small canal. It was constructed of stone of various colours, and decorated with numerous figures... In this basin various kinds of water-fowls were swimming up and down, and everything was so charming and beautiful that we could find no word... Indeed I do not believe a country was ever discovered which was equal in splendour to this... But, at the present moment, there is not a vestige of all this remaining, and not a stone of this beautiful town is now standing" There's more descriptions of different structures and gardens and the zoos and aquaria and the avariary, but Youtube doesn't like comments being too long, so I'll move on. As that last sentence implies, when conflict broke out and Spanish Conquistadors (and armies from 7 or so other states in the area which allied with Cortes, who did most of the actual work: in general most of the conquest, from the fall of the Aztec to the decades of fighting against other city-states in Central and Western mexico and Maya states in the Yucatan Penisula, was being done by native armies, often still led by their rulers (now integrated into Spanish nobility/administration): Figures like Ixtlilxochitl II, Xicotencatl, deserve as much credit as Cortes) assaulted Tenochtitlan and other cities in the valley, in many cases there was a lot of infrastructural damage. For Tenochtitlan in particular, the canals were filled in, the aquaducts were destroyed, and the levees were broken to starve and flood the city as it was being sieged. Once the Conquistadors and troops from other local cities breached the city itself, it was systematically leveled as the Spanish/allied troops went through the city as to avoid dense urban warfare and being flanked. When Mexico City was built over it's ruins, much of these water management systems (which, mind you, was something Mesoamericans in general excelled at: Many larger cities had interconnected canal, aquaduct, resvoir and drainage systems ) were either left in disrepair due to combination of inability and apathy by the Spanish, and over the following century or two Mexico City kept being ravaged by floods as a result, made worse by the drop in sanitation standards (the Mesoamericans, the Aztec in particular and Tenochtitlan particularly so, had a huge emphasis on cleanliness and hygiene, as well as pretty complex and vacationed medical practices and bontanical/herbal science ), often became fetid and disease ridden. Bottom line, the ineffective flooding control measures instituted by the Spanish and latter Mexico eventually resulted in plans to drain the lake system, and this was done gradually over the next few centuries, with particular major losses over the past century or so due urban expansion, pollution, and water table loss (In fact, all of Mexico city is now sinking as a result of this,: By the time it's done it will have sunk over 100 feet). Even 50 years ago, some of the remaining lake Xochimilco and it's surviving canals/chinampas farms were still being called one of the prettiest places on the planet. Today, only a small fraction of the original lakes (and chinampas) is left at Xochimilco and Chalco, and that's all that's left of the Axolotl's natural habitat. There are some organizations and local farmers still using Chinampas there that are trying to preserve the chinampas, canals, and Axolotl, but I haven't had the chance to really do research on which ones are reputable, so I can't give any specific recommendations for people interested.

My daughter has had an axolotl for years…we keep it is the basement where the temperature stays nice and cool most of the year. It has been a great pet! Great video!!

Thank you for this video, I feel like axolotls suffer the same fate as hedgehogs do: so many people buy them on impulse cause they're cute and trendy but end up neglecting it, giving it improper care, or getting bored of it and selling it. I'm hoping this can educate people before their commitment :D

Just so you know: You should not feed Axolotls fish with bones. You cannot keep axolotls with snails as the snails will suck off the axolotl’s slime coat. You can really only keep them with Shrimp (I suggest Cherry shrimp and Ghost Shrimp), aswell as White Cloud Minnows. You also can NOT have them on gravel or they will die.

There is an axolotl at a local pet store that had a leg injury and regrew the kimb after the joint. But the original limb is still there so it's got two hands on one limb

I've always thought axolotls were stinkin' rad, so this video is especially delightful, Clint. I'm glad to hear this critically endangered species is doing well in captivity!

Dude I swear this is the universe or something. Just watched your video on the ' 5 best reptiles for beginners' randomly and I was wondering if you ever made a video on axolotls as I was wondering what you would say about them. Lo and behold I type it up and I see you posted this 10 minutes ago. What the hell??!! Its like magic lol.

Mr. Clint PLEEEEASE do a video about Newts! pointing the differences between them and salamanders, for example. I Love your knowledge and your way of teaching us all about biology. Thanks for what you do. Thx so much!!

My daughter is obsessed with them. We are planning to get her one for Christmas and set it up in the basement. I'm so thankful you made this video as I learned a lot from this.

The absolute look of wonder and awe on Clint's face when the train actually came by is just. My day was made. Thanks Clint. x)

As much as 'optimistic carnivore' perfectly suits these adorable button-eyed cuties I...I somehow suspect he might have meant 'opportunistic'?...But then again I'm no biologist so it could mean one and the same. What lovely li'l gremlins they are ^_^

Seeing an axolotl always reminds me of a question I got about the Lizard in spider-man. Why Dr. Connors research lizard's generative ability and not axolotl's? Seeing that lizards can regrow their tail but not their limb, and the regrown tail isn't perfect unlike Axolotl's regenerative ability. Can you imagine the Lizard villain but with Axolotl's look.

Going hard on those Hook references. That's what I like about Clint, his willingness to fully commit to a bit.

Guy chained up in the back: the best pet felony charge for you?

To me, axolotls have always looked like salamanders trying to turn into lions.

I had to immediately go and see what a morphed axolotl looks like. Interesting!!

I'm surprised by the 4/5 on hardiness. I've always heard they're much more difficult to keep relative to other aquatic creatures. Like an advanced level pet

i love the way clint says "upfront costs" I wait for it with anticipation each and every video.