The salamander, long a
metaphor for the Mexican soul, risks extinction unless its sole habitat, the
canal system of Xochimilco, can be restored.
By Richard Fausset, Los
Angeles Times
October 1, 2012,
Mexico City— Somewhere
underneath the hull of Armando Tovar's boat, the aquatic manifestation of the
great god Xolotl was slithering along the muddy canal bottom, digesting bugs,
laying eggs and trying to avoid extinction.
Even though he could not see
the creature, Tovar knew it would be confronting its troubled environment with
that weird fixed smile, the one that makes it appear to be in on some cosmic
joke.
As a 9-inch salamander, of
course, the ajolote (pronounced ah-ho-LO-tay) couldn't know its own cultural
significance in Mexico. It couldn't know its role in the Aztec creation
myth. Or its freak-show star status among biology nerds for its ability to
regenerate lost limbs, heart cells and bits of brain. Or its allure, in the
world of arts and letters, as both a cryptic literary symbol and a metaphor for
the Mexican soul.
It couldn't know, on this
placid Tuesday morning, that Armando Tovar was in this long, flat wooden boat,
with his colleagues and their water-quality monitoring devices, hoping to save
it from oblivion.
Tovar, 33, a biologist at
Mexico's National Autonomous University, or UNAM, is one of a group of scholars
seeking to solve the ecological puzzle of the ajolote and its sole habitat, the
canal system of Xochimilco, the last watery remnant of the Aztec society built
on the lakes and wetlands of the Valley of Mexico.
Today, Xochimilco is a heavily
visited oasis of crops and canals hemmed by the teeming, concrete presence that
some here call la mancha urbana, the urban stain. Its 110 miles of waterways
are a place where tourists and locals fritter away Sunday afternoons, floating
on brightly colored gondolas, drinking beer and taking in the area's remaining
chinampas, small agricultural islands that were invented by Aztec farmers.
The precious green space
scrubs carbon dioxide from Mexico City's famously polluted air, serves as a
rest stop for 84 species of migratory birds and helps recharge a perilously
overtaxed aquifer.
But it also is dealing with
pollution issues of its own, and that has consequences for the salamander whose
strangely childish looks have made waves as far as Japan, where it was the
inspiration for a Pokemon character.
In 1998, Xochimilco was home
to tens of thousands of ajolotes. Today, Tovar said, the number might be as low
as 100.
The forces aligned against the
ajolote are formidable, some as old as Mexico itself.
Luis Zambrano, the director of
UNAM's Ecological Restoration Laboratory and leader of the rescue effort, said
the problems started with the 16th century conquistadors who, hailing from arid
Spain, saw the lake system as a problem to be solved. So they drained it,
making way for a modern metropolis in which, he said, natural water systems are
still often viewed as a hindrance to progress.
The researchers, despite years
of restoration efforts, have struggled to undo the harm. The ajolote habitat
has been degraded by water extraction, industrial fertilizers, the pressures of
tourism, and untreated wastewater discharged by rogue developments inside
Xochimilco's protected area.
The canals are also teeming
with nonnative carp and tilapia, introduced in a misguided '70s-era aquaculture
project. These heartier foreign species feast on ajolote eggs and compete for
scarce resources. "I call it, 'A society's defeat, caused by
society,'" Tovar said.
Last month, the director of
the National Water Commission, Jose Luis Luege, said Xochimilco was in danger
of deteriorating so severely that it could lose its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. He recommended that the
federal government immediately launch an ambitious, 20-year restoration plan,
the newspaper Excelsior reported.
The city and federal
governments already have spent millions over the years. But Zambrano said the
funding for the ajolote project is wildly inconsistent from year to year,
making it difficult to plan long term.
To Zambrano, Xochimilco's
famous salamander is a slimy sentinel, a canary in Mexico City's ecological
coal mine. Its disappearance from the wild, he argues, would be a warning that
the megacity was no longer a sustainable proposition.
Protecting the ajolote, he
wrote in a recent essay, "means protecting ourselves from ourselves."
***
The Aztecs believed that the
creature formally known as the Ambystoma
mexicanum was an iteration of Xolotl, the deformed god of lightning and
Charon-like ferryman of the dead to the underworld. Xolotl, the legend goes,
took the form of an ajolote to escape a death sentence imposed upon him as the
current universe was being created. UCLA art history professor John Pohl notes that the
Aztecs also saw in the amphibian's regenerative powers a metaphor for the
bounty of the lake system that sustained them.
Until recent decades, when the
creature began to disappear, ajolote-derived products were important components
in local folk medicine. Its flesh also was valued as a particularly tasty
tamale filling.
Over the centuries,
naturalists worldwide have been fascinated not only with the ajolote's
regenerative abilities, but also with its state of suspended pre-adolescence:
Unlike most amphibians, which trade gills for lungs upon reaching adulthood,
the ajolote keeps its external gills, which appear like a spiky collar behind
its curiously smiling face.
The creature's biological
anomalies, historic resonance and otherworldly appearance offered an
inescapable appeal to a certain kind of Latin American thinker. The ajolote was
the subject of a well-known Kafkaesque short story by the late Argentine writer
Julio Cortazar and has featured prominently in poems by Mexican writers Octavio
Paz ("Salamander/in the abstract city/between the vertiginous
geometries") and Jose Emilio Pacheco ("The ajolote is our
emblem/embodying the fear of being no one/and retreating/into the perpetual
night, in which the gods/rot under the mud").
In 1987, the Mexican academic
Roger Bartra, in his influential book "The Cage of Melancholy,"
embarked on an extended meditation on the ajolote, comparing it to the Mexican
national character, a "strange amphibian" that is developmentally
suspended, ajolote-like, between the primitive and the modern.
As Tovar and his colleagues
toured a muddy, green chinampa, their boat docked, they said they didn't buy
into Bartra's assertion that the animal bears "the terrible weight of
symbolizing the Mexican national character."
But that didn't mean they
weren't taking advantage of the ajolote's notoriety. To Tovar, the ajolote —
cute, as far as salamanders go — serves as a kind of polar bear for the effort
to save Xochimilco. It is their sympathetic critter. At a recent environmental
fair, the biologists hawked copies of a children's book with a smiling cartoon
ajolote on the cover, piloting one of Xochimilco's famous boats.
"In truth, the ajolote
itself is not so important to me … or, rather, it's only important in the
broader context of this threatened environment," Tovar said. "The
ajolote is our flag."
***
But an intellectual pedigree
and a cute face can help only so much.
Tovar's colleague Leonardo
Sastre said the group contracts with local fishermen to haul an average of 100
tons of nonnative fish out of the canals each year. Yet their populations are
still growing. At one point, on the prow of the little boat, he pointed as the
normally still water began to shudder and quake.
"Look," he said.
"Tilapia."
The rescue team is also
working with an environmental group to encourage farmers on the chinampas to
raise their crops without the fertilizers that harm the water. But less
fertilizer means more work.
Carlos Sumano, a member of the
environmental group, dreams of the day when hip Mexico City chefs who subscribe
to the slow-food movement will buy regularly from the chinamperos. But , he
said, fewer than a dozen of the hundreds of the farmers have changed their ways.
Standing on the bank of a
canal, Tovar showed examples of plants that have been introduced to naturally
clean the water of contaminants, including a free-floating, spongy specimen
known in English as duckweed. The vegetation has been introduced in some small
canals that are also outfitted with barriers to block nonnative fish.
These trench
"refuges" for the ajolote have been somewhat successful; however,
they cover only about 1,600 square yards of water, a tiny fraction of the canal
system. Sastre said there wasn't enough financing to do more.
Two cages were submerged in
the dark water of one trench, dusted with bright green duckweed. They contained
15 ajolotes hatched inside. Their parents were raised in a lab.
The biologists are not ready
to release them into the wild. They worry that could introduce new diseases and
genetic problems to the ecosystem. And for now, Tovar said, the water beyond
the clean trench was too filthy for them to survive in.
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