Axolotl Quotes

I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities. When I was twelve, I remember reading about axolotls, which are basically a species of salamander that has evolved to remain permanently in the aquatic larval stage. They manage to keep their gills (rather than trading them in for lungs, like salamanders or frogs) by shutting down metamorphosis and becoming sexually mature in the water. I was completely flabbergasted when I read that by simply giving these creatures the "metamorphosis hormone" (thyroid extract) you could make the axolotl revert back into the extinct, land-dwelling, gill-less adult ancestor that it had evolved from. You could go back in time, resurrecting a prehistoric animal that no longer exists anywhere on Earth. I also knew that for some mysterious reason adult salamanders don't regenerate amputated legs but the tadpoles do. My curiosity took me one step further, to the question of whether an axolotl - which is, after all, an "adult tadpole" - would retain its ability to regenerate a lost leg just as a modern frog tadpole does. And how many other axolotl-like beings exist on Earth, I wondered, that could be restored to their ancestral forms by simply giving them hormones? Could humans - who are after all apes that have evolved to retain many juvenile qualities - be made to revert to an ancestral form, perhaps something resembling Homo erectus, using the appropriate cocktail of hormones? My mind reeled out a stream of qu ~ V.S. Ramachandran

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl. ~ Julio Cortazar

The moral of the story is…Jeff is a moron. A baby axolotl can't fight a fish! You can't expect babies to do the things adults do. You can't expect anyone to do things they can't do. If you ask me to lift five hundred pounds, I can't. It doesn't matter how much I want to, how much conviction I put into it. It's just not something I can do. Maybe if I'd been training all my life, but not now, not tomorrow. ~ Sylvain Neuvel