Axolotls are the new llamas. Which were, of course, the new unicorns. Which triggered a moment for narwhals. If you are an unusual-looking animal, this is your time. Even humans who have never seen an axolotl – a type of salamander – in the smooth and slimy flesh will have met a cartoon or cuddly one. Mexican axolotls have the kind of look that is made for commercial reproduction. The most popular domestic species is pink. Some glow in the dark – and their smile is bigger than Walter’s in the Muppets.
At Argos or Kmart, you can buy axolotls as cuddly toys, featured on socks, hoodies and bedding, or moulded into nightlights. You can crochet an axolotl, stick a rubber one on the end of your pencil or wear them on your underpants. The Economist says they’re a “global megastar”. More than 1,000 axolotl-themed products are listed on Walmart’s website. They grace US Girl Scouts patches, McDonald’s Happy Meals, and the 50-peso bill, a design so popular that, last year, the Bank of Mexico reported that 12.9 million people were hoarding the notes.
The animal’s name – which comes from the Aztec god Xolotl – provides greetings card designers with infinite puns. Love you alotl! Thanks alotl! You can ask axolotl questions about how our infatuation came about, but you can’t deny that this beguiling salamander has captured human hearts.
“Every time I look at one, I can’t help but smile back,” says Nicole Rowe, who runs an axolotl rehoming centre from her house in the West Midlands, England, between shifts at a craft store. “You know that saying: ‘If you smile for long enough, eventually you will start to feel happier’? That’s the effect they have on me.”
Rowe is also an artist who used to design tattoos and now makes axolotl models for her Etsy shop. She has a mug decorated with a pole-dancing axolotl and the words “Only Fins”. On our video call, she’s wearing an axolotl sweatshirt. Behind her, the wall of her spare room, which she calls the Lotl Room, is lined with tanks housing 30 adult axolotls, most of which she has rescued from people who can no longer care for them. There is a whole shelf of cuddly axolotl toys.
Rowe acquired her first living axolotl – a “dirty leucistic morph” (pale with dark spots) called Ghost – eight years ago, when she was in her mid-20s. She discovered them via Pokémon (though in Japan they were old news, having broken out in cartoon form in a 1985 advert for UFO instant noodles). In the early 2000s, when Rowe was 11, her favourite Pokémon was Mudkip, and when she delved deeper, Google told her that Mudkip was a cross between a mudskipper fish and an axolotl.
When Rowe acquired Ghost, axolotls were so rare that her pet shop had to order one especially for her. In the years since, they have proliferated in popular culture. In 2010, they were one of the inspirations for Toothless the dragon in the film How to Train Your Dragon. In 2020, Fortnite released Axo, an axolotl skin. And the following year, Minecraft introduced axolotls – and a bucket to carry them in – to its 140 million monthly active players. The number of people acquiring pet axolotls surged. The American public radio network NPR ran warning stories of people accidentally breeding them. (It is illegal to own axolotls in some US states and Canadian provinces.)
In the wilds of social media, the axolotl’s viral forebears have often paired unusual facial features with a winning smile. A species name that contains challenging letter combinations definitely helps the social media profile. Take llamas, for instance. But also capybaras, which had a moment in the early 2020s, and quokkas, who are known for their smiley facial expressions and as a result are practically fighting off selfie-hunters in south-western Australia. Any kākāpōs or okapis reading this may wish to lie low.
So what is it about axolotls that humans find so compulsively relatable?
From a commercial point of view, says Joe Evans, a buyer at Selfridges department store in the UK, who first encountered them in toy form, “they have exploded as a must-have character for gen Alpha, with brands such as Squishmallows, Lego and Posture Pals adding them to their ranges. With their soft, squishy shapes and expressive faces, axolotls tap into feelgood comfort. For some, there’s a fascination that these almost mythical-looking creatures are real animals.”
On the one hand, the axolotl is an anthropomorphist’s dream. There is that smile, of course: at times, a childlike line-drawing of happiness, at others, a full, pink, apparently toothless grin. “They’ve also got baby-like features, wide-set eyes,” points out Prof Luis Zambrano, an ecologist conducting a census of the wild axolotl population in the floating gardens of Lake Xochimilco, southern Mexico City, one of its last remaining habitats.
There are also those very human-looking hands. “I love their fingers,” Rowe says. “I love their little hands and feet. Sometimes you see one hand holding on to a plant and the rest of their body floating, and they look like a little flag in the water. It’s so cute.”
On social media, an axolotl only has to do something vaguely human – such as yawn, or “dance” – and it instantly generates content. They’re a gift to doodlers, often so still in their tank that owners have plenty of time to draw sunglasses and hats on to the glass and upload the videos to TikTok. Their head shape resembles that of a Funko Pop!, while their “floofs”, or external gills, are a visual trademark as unique and instantly identifiable as a unicorn’s horn.
Fittingly, there is a sense of magic about axolotls. “Their looks might be the first thing that attracts you, but when you start digging into how these animals function, and the things they can do, it’s amazing,” says Aida Rodrigo Albors, who leads a research group at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. “They’re simple creatures, but they have amazing powers. If they lose their tail, they can regrow a whole new spinal cord within a new tail. Any tissue that you name, they can regenerate it. Even if they lose a big part of their brain, it grows back.” Rodrigo Albors’ ambition is “to learn how regeneration works, and then try to implement that in animals that can’t regenerate”.
The power to regenerate isn’t quite an instant health potion – it takes a few weeks to a few months to regrow a limb – but the implications for human healing are tantalising. When Rodrigo Albors was a PhD student in Dresden, Germany, in the early 2010s, people had no idea what she was talking about when she said she was researching axolotl regeneration. Now, of course, “that’s completely flipped”.
Unlike most salamanders, axolotls reach adulthood without ever metamorphosing. “They grow and grow, and live for over 20 years – but remain as tadpoles all their life,” Rodrigo Albors explains.
At a time when longevity has gone from a fringe and sometimes wacky research interest to a multibillion-dollar industry, the appeal is obvious. In this regard, axolotls represent a sort of fount of ancient knowledge. It is not quite eternal youth, or the philosopher’s stone, but axolotls may be as close as we get on Earth. Perhaps that’s why the knock-on effect for humans is to celebrate them in pretty infantile ways, such as singing along to Ask an Axolotl, the 2025 YouTube song which had 16m views within a few days of its posting, and will make you pine for the sophistication and wit of The Duck Song.
Axolotls’ qualities clearly appeal to the human love of fantasy. Those feathery gills give them a mythical or alien look. (Rowe has named hers Ghost, Wraith, Banshee and Apsu, the last after the Babylonian sea god.) In Julio Cortázar’s 1956 short story Axolotl, the narrator stares so hard at the salamanders in the zoo that he becomes one. The fact that axolotls are “so different-looking” is part of their appeal. “They look like they’re not from this world,” Rowe says softly.
In the wild, axolotls sadly may not be long for this world. Zambrano says he will be lucky to see a single axolotl in the canals of Lake Xochimilco in the final phase of his census. His own passion for axolotls began with an offer of funding, but it was “love at second sight”, he says, when he encountered them in the work of some of his favourite biologists in history, such as Alexander von Humboldt, Georges Cuvier and Stephen Jay Gould. He has been studying axolotls for 25 years.
Drainage, the encroaching development of surrounding areas and the introduction of predatory fish such as carp and tilapia have all contributed to axolotls’ critically endangered classification. In 1998, Lake Xochimilco had 6,000 axolotls per square kilometre. By 2008, there were only 100, and in 2014 just 36.
Three years ago, Zambrano helped to launch a fundraising campaign called Adoptaxolotl to fund the census and “raise concern about the situation of the axolotl in the wild”. In his office, he has his fair share of toy axolotls – people keep giving them to him – but the wild axolotl is “completely different to the pet one”. It’s brown or grey, and it rarely smiles. “Of course not,” he says. “They don’t like you. Because they are wild …”
Axolotls abound in Mexico City’s iconography. When the city co-hosts the World Cup this summer, its official mascot will be a bipedal axolotl. “I am a little bit afraid,” Zambrano says, “of what is going to happen in the World Cup … Everyone will think this is a very nice party, but the cost, particularly here, will be Xochimilco being seen as a tourist attraction instead of the home of the axolotl. People will arrive with garbage and noise, and everybody will want a mariachi in the boat.”
If only the Mexican government could do for axolotls what the Chinese did for pandas, he says. “About 30 or 40 years ago, their popularity pushed the government to create protective areas in China” – nature reserves, investment in the bears’ habitats. In contrast, Zambrano believes that the local government in Mexico City has acted “contrary to [axolotls’] preservation … They think that it’s an important achievement of conservation to have them in the Mexican zoo in a very special place where the elephants used to be.”
More generally, Zambrano is worried that “TikTok, Instagram, Minecraft, all these things, have created a parallel world. So it doesn’t matter if the real ones are going down, if I have them in two dimensions … Internationally, we are going in a very strange direction,” he says.
Milena Andrzejczak has recently bought two axolotls from Fish Planet in Shoreditch. She loves nature, and knows that Axel and Drogon, which she treats with care and respect, are different from the wild ones, and has read enough to understand that in their native habitat, axolotls are endangered. “So I said: ‘OK, I want to take one and take care of it,” she says. Since she got fish and axolotls, she says, “I said to my husband, we don’t need TV. It’s the most relaxing thing to sit and watch them.” She feels that by caring for them, she is connecting with an animal that she cares about in the wild.
“The population is going down, the habitat is really bad, but when you see them floating in a tank, they are in Zen mode,” Zambrano says. Maybe calmness and a smile in the face of possible oblivion is something that humans can relate to. And maybe, too, we relate to the apparent strangeness of axolotls – the sense of a quirk, an oddity, perhaps at a time when we’re finding ourselves increasingly strange. Though, of course, none of us is any stranger than the next animal.
