Before reading this interview, Google the word axolotl or axolotl and calmly observe this little water monster, the ambystoma mexicanum, with its little hands, its round, freckled face topped with a plume of external gills, like a lacustrine coronavirus. And his goofy smile. The bug is one of the most unique on the planet due to its potential to regenerate what it loses. You tear off a leg and it replaces it, for example; even half a body can be reborn in a matter of days and without a trace of a scar. Laboratories around the world work on these unusual capacities like someone looking for the grail of eternal youth. Andrés Cota Hiriart, 39, is one of the Mexican biologists (writer and screenwriter) fascinated by this amphibian that is practically extinct in its natural habitat, but survives almost domestically in who knows how many aquariums on the planet. Your book the axolotl (Editorial Elephant) goes for the second edition. It was logical that someone who worships weirdos would gloss the animal that the ancient Mexicans considered a god. But Cota Hiriart insists on uncovering oceans and clearing jungles to document other oddities that inhabit them. As a child he was one of those who hid snakes in the underwear drawer. Ask his mother.
Ask. Why doesn’t the axolotl decide to live forever if it is capable of regenerating itself?
Answer. Because despite being a perpetual larva, it ages. It is an old larva. It just doesn’t go through the secondary sexual changes, it’s as if we humans reproduce as fetuses.
P. How many laboratories and lines of research are there in the world on this?
R. Ugh, a thousand. Most deal with regeneration. It would be impressive to regenerate an eye, a lung and make it indistinguishable, not like the tail of a lizard that is truncated and grows strange. And they only do it once or twice. Axolotls, however, can regenerate a severed leg up to 25 or 26 times.
P. Maybe they checked it.
R. Before, these things were done in laboratories. Maybe it didn’t regenerate anymore because the animal was depressed. What it does is dedifferentiate cells, the biological clock goes backwards so that a skin cell becomes an essential cell and then turns it into bone or whatever is necessary.
P. A new American multinational, Altos Laboratories, financed by a certain Bezos, is said to have put $2.7 billion to work rejuvenating monkeys.
R. If some humans are going to live 200 or 300 years, maybe we are already living with them and Bezos is the first candidate.
P. A few weeks ago, some mayors from Mexico City had the idea of releasing axolotls into Lake Xochimilco, where they originated. Criticism rained down on them. They didn’t do anything right, but the photo remained there.
R. It was a scene from Monty Python. creepy Grabbing them with their hands, releasing them into polluted waters without an adaptation process. Some calculated that they would survive three hours. I believe that they can even last a little longer, but they cannot be released into an environment where they have already ceased to exist for reasons that have not been corrected. Reintroducing animals to the wild, and Xochimilco is not completely, is complicated. There are pathogens that we pass on to them when we touch them and fungi, which is the apocalypse of the amphibian and that are transmitted to the natural environment with laboratory animals. On top they put them in the sun.
P. What extreme weakness being such superheroes.
R. They are super fragile, they get sick fast. At 20 degrees they begin to have stress.
P. Well, global warming is divine.
R. That is going to be the last straw for many amphibians. The last formal census of axolotls that was done, in 2009, was done by Luis Zambrano, he only found five in the entire sampling.
P. In 1998 there were 6,000 per square kilometer…
R. And some of the few that exist may be reintroductions, in captivity they can breed a lot, up to 300 eggs and, well, it is human to want to release the babies to the lake, but it is done without control.
P. Well, it’s not bad to have aquariums, then?
R. There are very polarized views on that. But the question is, why, what for, thinking about what.
P. Dogs were once wild. We have also tamed the axolotl.
R. Maybe it will stay in fish tanks forever. There are already about nine varieties of colors, a la carte, and then they will decide to cross the axolotl with another amphibian. In the long run it can be like with dogs.
P. Orgiastic snakes, lizards with virgin births, sexual parasitism, fish transsexuality, sex with themselves. Are you obsessed with weird animals or with sex?
R. That’s part of ongoing research for a book I’m working on. I started collecting those stories because they amuse me and break paradigms. Humans are very limited, but we feel that biology must be structured from our experience. For example, monogamy occurs in the animal world in about 5% of species, barely, and they are not heteropatriarchal. There are 500 animal species with same-sex relationships. Everyone who does what he wants, right?
P. Do you see the simple human being?
R. No, the human being is also fascinating, what happens is that we are very self-absorbed.
P. A human to mate, even desiring another, can take up to 300 chapters of a soap opera.
R. Yes, some say that humans spend an average of five minutes a day on reproductive tasks. That species should be extinct.
P. The pale Serrano fish, from Panama, changes sex 20 times a day. That has not been done by God.
R. Maybe it’s not so strange, it’s that we humans have no idea what’s going on down there…
P. In the oceans, it refers…
R. Maybe the norm there is to change sex. 70% of the planet is down there.
P. Zombie worms. He says that they carry up to 100 microscopic males inside them that are only good for procreation. What does this tell us about the future?
R. It is very good. It could already be the present, with the amount of sperm banks that there are, men could be given a neck [en México, matar] and the problems were over.
P. Do you have dogs or cats?
R. I have two cats, and they are the worst for the environment, both the feral ones and those that live in an apartment, from the balcony they catch a bird. They are diabolical in terms of the environment. This is how we humans are, we are full of contradictions.
P. What is, finally, your favorite bug?
R. The pale Serrano from Panama, because it is the utopia of the inclusive couple, in which everyone does everything. As a group, snakes are what interests me the most.
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