By Geoffrey Giller, New York
Times, July 30, 2018
PÁTZCUARO, MEXICO — Atop the
highest hill in this lakeside town sits the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de la
Salud, built in the 1500s with whitewashed walls and red stone columns.
On a street around the corner
from the basilica, a wooden door framed in carved stone and marked with a cross
fleury stands open from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m., and again from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
“We pray for you,” reads a sign on the door in Spanish.
Inside, the room is sparse and
dark save for a wooden window and three locked doors. Behind them is a convent,
home to two dozen nuns of the Dominican Order.
But the convent also hosts an
even larger number of very unexpected residents: a thriving colony of
endangered salamanders. Scientists call them Ambystoma dumerilii, but the nuns
and everyone else in Pátzcuaro call them achoques.
Carefully tended by the nuns,
about 300 achoques live in glass aquaria and white enamel bathtubs lining the
walls of a long hallway and two adjoining rooms in the convent. The nuns
support themselves partly by selling a cough syrup called jarabe made from the
salamanders’ skin.
But the basilica’s achoques are
increasingly valuable for another reason.
They are found nowhere but Lake
Pátzcuaro, and outside the convent their numbers are falling fast. There are smaller
captive colonies elsewhere in Pátzcuaro, but none as large as the one in the
basilica. It may be critical to the salamanders’ prospects in the wild.
“That is why we consider that the
nuns will be very vital in the future,” said Gerardo Garcia, a curator and
expert on endangered species at the Chester Zoo in England.
As salamanders go, they’re huge —
the largest ones approach a foot in length. But most striking are their gills:
luxurious, ruddy filaments that frame their heads like manes and undulate
gently in the water.
In the basilica, their main
caretaker is Sister Ofelia Morales Francisco. On a recent visit, she greeted a
visitor in a white habit, her black veil crisp and pinned in place, a
blue-beaded rosary dangling by her side.
Asked a question, she sometimes
answered only with a small smile. But around the achoques, she opens up, proud
to show off her amphibious charges.
Their tanks are spotless, each
with a bubbling aerator made from half of a plastic soda bottle filled with
stones and coiled fabric. In a glass case above the tanks, a baby Jesus dressed
as a doctor keeps watch.
The sisters used to make their
syrup using salamanders collected from the lake. When they began to disappear,
the nuns established the convent’s colony because they were worried about
losing the jarabe business.
“What would we do — not make any
syrup?” Sister Ofelia said in Spanish. But eventually she and the other nuns
also came to recognize a conservation imperative in their work.
“It’s about protecting a species
from nature,” she said. “If we don’t work to take care of it, to protect it, it
will disappear from creation.”
A threatened environment
As the number of people living
around Lake Pátzcuaro, one of the largest in Mexico, has steadily increased
over the centuries, the water quality has suffered.
Runoff exacerbated by
deforestation carries silt and pollution into the lake. Untreated sewage is
still dumped into water, and an invasive hyacinth spreads along its shores. Cow
pastures extend right to the lake’s marshy edges.
To make matters worse, largemouth
bass intentionally were introduced into Lake Pátzcuaro in the 1930s, and in
1974 the much more destructive carp were brought in. They eat the eggs and
larvae of the achoques.
Between 1982 and 2010, the
already shallow lake declined by about 13 feet, losing a quarter of its total
volume because of declining rainfall and increasing runoff carried into the
lake. Various efforts to rehabilitate Pátzcuaro have met only limited success.
Achoques aren’t the only Mexican
salamanders in trouble. Of the 17 species in their genus found in Mexico, 12
are listed as endangered or critically endangered by the International Union
for Conservation of Nature.
At Lake Pátzcuaro, fishermen have
been catching and eating achoques since before the Spanish arrived in Mexico.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, achoques caught in the lake were piled high at
the fish market in town, recalled Brad Shaffer, a professor of biology at the
University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied the salamanders.
But the numbers of achoques
started to fluctuate wildly in the 80s and crashed in 1989. In 1985, a friar
suggested that the nuns start their own colony because the lake was
deteriorating, according to Sister Ofelia.
It wasn’t until 2000 that the
nuns had their own thriving community of salamanders in the convent. The nuns
have been cooking up jarabe, however, for nearly a century.
“People have faith in it because
the nuns make it,” said Dolores Huacuz, an expert on the region’s amphibians
and a retired university professor.
Local legend has it that the
sisters got the secret recipe from a young Purépecha woman, one of the
indigenous people who lived in this region before Spanish colonization.
Her jarabe cured one of the
sisters, strengthening her lungs and abolishing her anemia. And the identity of
that young woman, according to the story: the Virgin Mary herself, in disguise.
Whether or not the cough syrup
recipe came to the nuns through divine intervention, there’s no doubt that the
Purépecha people were eating achoques and using them for medicine long before
the arrival of Europeans and Catholicism, according to Tzintia Velarde Mendoza,
a project coordinator at Faunam, a wildlife conservation group, who has studied
the cultural history of the achoques.
The name achoque is from a
Purépecha word — achójki — possibly derived from the term for mud.
‘Very healthy’ stock
Dr. Garcia, of the Chester Zoo,
has been working with a team based in Mexico to survey Lake Pátzcuaro to try
and figure out how many salamanders are left in the wild, and where in the lake
they live.
“Jumping into reintroduction
programs looks very sexy in the media for one press release, but that’s really
not the best way to do it,” Dr. Garcia said.
There are still wild achoques
left in the lake, Dr. Garcia said, including a small population in the northern
part of the lake. Fishermen have told Dr. Garcia’s team that they do
occasionally spot the salamanders.
But as the population has thinned,
so has its genetic diversity. That’s where the convent’s thriving colony may
one day make an enormous difference — assuming it is genetically diverse
itself.
“Three hundred individuals, if
they’re relatively unrelated, is a very, very healthy, large stock to be
working from,” said Dr. Shaffer.
At the moment, however, there are
no plans to move achoques from the convent to the lake. Before that happens,
the water quality issues must be addressed, Dr. Garcia said, and the genetic
diversity of the nuns’ colony must be assessed. Work on both issues is ongoing,
he said.
In the room where the nuns sell
their cough syrup, a mural on the wall depicts the lake with salamanders
swimming in clear waters. The glowing hands of a nun hold an achoque beside an
image of the Virgin Mary.
“Being part of a religious order
like ours is not an obstacle for scientific progress,” said Sister Ofelia.
“The order is devoted to the
research of theological and scientific knowledge in benefit of humanity,” she
added. Part of the order’s mission is “to work in favor of a more humane
conscience full of love and justice for nature.”
Another mural bears the official
name of the nuns’ Management Unit for the Conservation of Wildlife, registered
with the Mexican government: Jimbani Erandi. In the language of the indigenous
Purépecha people, it means “new dawn.”
Rodrigo Pérez Ortega contributed
reporting. A fellowship from the International Reporting Project supported Mr.
Giller’s reporting.
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