Mexican axolotl - commonly known as hexagonal dinosaur
[Animal Profile]:
The Mexican blunt salamander (English name: Axolotl), also known as the American salamander, commonly known as the hexagonal dinosaur, is an aquatic amphibian and is endemic to Mexico. The natural environment can only live in silted waterways and lakes. It is famous for its unique appearance and sexual maturity of juveniles. That is, even after sexual maturity, it does not undergo changes to adapt to the land, and still maintains its aquatic inhabiting body form. Although it is kept as a pet around the world (especially in North America and other places), its original habitat has been heavily exploited, causing rocky sandification at the bottom of the lake, destroying the silt environment at the bottom of the lake, and causing functional extinction. The living area is not more than 10 square kilometers. It is classified as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List.
[Morphological characteristics]:
The Mexican blunt-mouthed salamander is about 25~30 cm long, dark brown with black spots. Albinism, white mutants, and mutants of other colors are common. The limbs and feet are small , but the tail is quite long. The dorsal fin extends posteriorly from the back of the head to the caudal end. The ventral fin extends from the middle of the two hind limbs to the end of the tail. They have the ability to regenerate most of the limbs on their bodies, and their variable body color is also one of their charms, and it is said that there are more than 30 varieties worldwide. Common individuals in mainland China are primary color, albino black eye, albino red eye, gold and moran.
[Life habits]:
The Mexican axolotl is an omnivore. Main foods: algae, worms, shellless insects or droppings of small fish and small amounts of other fish. In feeding, you can feed a variety of easy-to-find foods, including: chicken, a variety of freshwater fish, freshwater shrimp, for convenience, you can also feed frozen or fresh blood worms, earthworms, wax worms. or other high-protein, low-fat, non-hard-shell and hard-spined foods, high-starch foods are fasted, and processed products eaten by people such as: ham sausages, cooked meat must not be fed. Juvenile axolotls can be fed water fleas, harvest shrimp or other freshwater microalgae until they are old enough to eat larger foods. Blunt salamanders look for food with a sense of smell, and they approach it and suck it with the vacuum force of the abdominal cavity. Therefore, juvenile axolotls cannot be kept with other animals, they will bite each other, even if they are of the same kind, but adult blunt salamanders can be kept together, and fish will bite their gills while the blunt salamander is sleeping, causing inflammation. Do not have small pieces of sand and gravel, they will be sucked into the stomach along with food (or simply treated as food) and retained and deposited.
[Reproduction]:
Most species of the blunt-mouthed salamander are mainly terrestrial and burrow in earthen caves. The blunt-mouthed axolotl hexagonal dinosaur is a well-known "larval mature" species of amphibians (juvenile form from birth to sexual maturity and laying eggs). He has lived in the water all his life, and also lays eggs in the water, and he basically lays more than 200 eggs at a time, and more than a thousand male and female polyculture should be considered before careful breeding, otherwise the eggs produced cannot be taken care of and cause their death, after all, these eggs are also a lovely life after birth. They have been kept for more than 100 years, mainly for live use in endocrine and other experiments, so research on their breeding and breeding has almost been fully established, and now you can go to the aquarium pet store to see them.
[Protection level]:
Listed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN) 2019 ver 3.1 - Critically endangered (CR).
Listed in Appendices I, II and III of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) 2019 Appendix II.