Girl Finds Extremely Rare Axolotl on Vacation After Mom Tells Her Not to Go Back in Water
Evie Hill’s mother told her the creatures she watched on YouTube weren’t real. Then the 10-year-old pulled an axolotl out of a Welsh river.
Evie was on holiday with her family near the Dipping Bridge on the River Ogmore near Bridgend, South Wales, when she spotted the 9-inch Mexican axolotl in the water. The creature was pale with speckles and had suffered injuries to its tail and stomach, believed to have been caused by a predator, BBC reported.
Evie knew what she was looking at. Her mom did not believe her.
“I went down to the bank and there was this thing with gills on its head. I was like: ‘That’s an axolotl.’ I was: ‘Mum, there’s an axolotl in the river.’ She went: ‘There’s not. You’re not going back in the water.’ So I went back in the water anyway, because I’d seen it. And then I caught it and brought it back,” Evie told BBC.
Her mother, Melanie Hill, told the BBC her daughter was “always finding things” in the wild. But this find was something else.
“The kids were down at the water having a nose and suddenly everything changed,” she recalled. “You can imagine my surprise, I couldn’t believe it.”
The Family Did Their Homework on Dippy’s Care
Rather than panicking about a surprise amphibian houseguest, the Hills researched how to rehabilitate the animal and said they have “no regrets” about bringing him home.
“We’ve got a much bigger tank and we plan to get that set up so it can be transferred,” Melanie said, adding that they sought advice from an expert and were told it was OK to keep it as a pet.
An Expert Says Evie Saved Dippy’s Life
Chris Newman, director of the National Centre for Reptile Welfare, credited Evie for saving Dippy’s life.
“This is a quite a unique situation, and I think the young female has a keen eye to actually spot it,” he said. “I think she did remarkably to find him.”
Newman praised Evie for catching the axolotl because it probably wouldn’t have lived long on its own.
“That itself is no mean feat,” he said. “They’re quite slippery, so I think she did really well.”
Why This Find Stunned Experts
Mexican axolotls are extremely rare. This marked the first documented discovery of an axolotl in the wild in the U.K., with only 50 to 1,000 left globally, per BBC.
Mexican axolotl salamanders are fully aquatic amphibians, meaning they spend their entire lives in water, according to National Geographic. In the wild, they’re found in just one location: the lake system of Xochimilco. This area is made up of man-made canals, small lakes, and seasonal wetlands that also play an important role in supplying water to Mexico City’s nearly 20 million residents.
One of the axolotl’s most unusual traits is neoteny, a condition where they keep juvenile characteristics into adulthood. While most amphibians eventually undergo metamorphosis and move from water to land, axolotls retain their tails and external feathery gills, essentially remaining in a permanent larval-like state.
They’re also well known in the scientific world for their remarkable regenerative abilities. Axolotls can regrow lost body parts, including limbs, in roughly a month.
However, their population has been declining. As Mexico City has expanded, Xochimilco’s waters have shrunk and become more polluted, reducing suitable habitat for the species. On top of that, invasive fish such as carp and tilapia compete with axolotls for food and also consume their eggs, further contributing to their decline.
This article was created by content specialists using various tools, including AI.
