Troubling Dualisms with the God in the Aquarium

This essay on how axolotls challenge Western dualisms and science is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.

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The axolotl is a creature whose very origins resist Western dualisms. According to the Nahua peoples whose ancestors were among the first to meet it, the axolotl was once one of several deities in charge of shaping the cosmos. A task which required a sacrifice, the gods gathered around the fire of creation and cast their bodies into the flames one after another, bringing forth the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, and the elements. Yet Xolotl, god of fire and lightning, wished not to die and fled to the primeval earth. Hunted by his enraged twin brother Quetzalcoatl, Xolotl hid in the depths of the great Lake Texcoco. There he acquired gills, fins, and a serpentine body suited to his underwater lair. And in this form, he was cursed to remain an axolotl, or “water monster,” forever bound to our material world for forsaking his sacred oath. 

In transgressing the boundary between the immortal and the mortal, the axolotl also blurs the boundary between human and more-than-human. Just as the axolotl is not quite god but not quite mortal, it is also not human and not conceptually distinct from humans. Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species helps us make sense of such more-than-human entanglements. She argues that “species of all kinds, living and not” coevolve in “a subject and object-shaping dance of encounter.” Companion species thus allow us to peer past Western dualisms like nature/culture and human/nonhuman.

Dualisms like human/nonhuman, Deborah Bird Rose argues, presuppose these terms as opposites “with one pole superior, the other inferior.” Thus overcoming dualism is crucial to finding a way out of ecological crisis. Yet Haraway’s focus on “domestic” more-than-human entanglements seems to reinscribe dualism. Privileging “man’s best friend,” for example, does little to challenge our perception of humans as separate from, and superior to, the web of relations often called “Nature.”

A god-like water monster, the axolotyl could hardly be considered a companion in the domestic sense. Its ambiguous relation to humans is thus well-suited to challenging the nature/culture binary and other Western dualisms we impose upon the world.

Troubling the Western Gaze

Spanish conquistadors were the first Europeans to look upon the axolotl. The god confined to a slimy “water monster” must have seemed as exotic to them as the place itself. Finding this supposedly divine being in local dishes may have been even more shocking. 

Had they thought critically, they might have recognized a semblance of their Eucharist in the Mesoamerican consumption of this and other sacred creatures. Judging by Spanish colonists’ suppression of Indigenous beliefs, however, there seems to have been no room in their evangelizing worldview for this supernatural figure. Its mythical treachery and mucky materiality certainly contradicted the Catholic separation of the pure, benevolent divinity from the soiled earthly realm in need of redemption.

In any case, early colonists failed to recognize the axolotl’s sacred status—which was perhaps also a reflection of the creature’s crucial role in sustaining its ecosystem. Centuries passed before the cultural heirs of colonial empires were able to see Xolotl in the soul-crushing stare of Ambystoma mexicanum—the scientific name they imposed in the meantime.

Colonial catalogers of New Spain’s biodiversity adapted the Nahuatl name for these “little water lizards” to Spanish—Ajolate. But since neither Ajolote nor accounts by missionaries like Berardino de Sahagún’s met the conventions popularized by Linneaus in (1735), George Kearsley Shaw and Frederick Polydore Nodder acquired a few specimens, studied them, and eventually christened the species Gyrinus mexicanus in 1798. In doing so, they inaugurated two interconnected trends that became the foundation for the axolotl’s relationship with the techno-scientific societies of the West: a relentless effort to make zoological sense of the species and the construction of aquacultural laboratories for studying the axolotl around the world.

The God in the Lab

Through the lens of Western zoology, the axolotl’s vaguely crocodilian body, slime-coated skin, feathery gills, and fishlike tail resembled not a trickster god but a juvenile salamander. Thus the strange creature was classified as a member of amphibia. The ambiguous traits and lifestyle of this animal grouping had already hinted at the limits of the either/or approach of Linnaean taxonomy. The axolotl complicated matters further because it remained a wholly aquatic creature throughout its life rather than metamorphosing into a semi-terrestrial adult, the characteristic that distinguishes true amphibians like frogs, newts, and salamanders from aquatic reptiles like turtles or crocodiles.

Zoologists’ intrigue with the axolotl led them to import the creatures from Xochimilco, a network of canals south of Mexico City and all that remained of the axolotl’s habitat by the nineteenth century, to laboratories around the world. Among these laboratories was a tank in the Jardin des plantes in Paris. The handful of axolotls that arrived there in 1864 birthed what is now the oldest self-sustaining population of laboratory animals in the world. Their descendants, upon making acquaintance with Julio Cortazar, would later infiltrate the popular imagination. But first, these Parisian axolotls offered a few answers along with a flurry of new questions to the ever-growing number of researchers puzzling over them.

One of the first to sense the depth of the axolotl’s categorical complexity was Marie Duméril. Working at the Jardin des plantes, he observed that the gills and fins of one of his specimens were beginning to recede while its eyes and limbs appeared to have grown bulgier. Duméril later theorized that the axolotl was neotenic, meaning it evolved to achieve sexual maturity while retaining juvenile characteristics that its ancestors and closest relatives lost over their life cycle. In other words, the axolotl reached adulthood without ever growing up. Unlike its close relatives, axolotls forsake their amphibious lifestyle in favor of a lifelong aquatic infancy. 

What followed was a flurry of studies that tested the hypothesis. Some, like those by Robert Wiedersheim (1879) and Samuel Garman (1884), studied the anatomy of axolotls and concluded that the species was a member of Ambystoma, a family of North American burrowing salamanders. Another study by August Weismann and Marie von Chavin (1876) argued that the stability of their native lakes favored neoteny. But for every attempt to figure the axolotl out, new, often contradictory evidence emerged. 

In any case, the promise of answers and their fascinating implications ensured the proliferation of axolotls in science labs. The ease with which they could be bred in captivity, their easily manipulable embryos, and the similarity of the base structure of their organs and systems to those of most vertebrates, made them ideal subjects for numerous medical and evolutionary studies. Researchers hoped to discover human applications for the axolotl’s superhuman abilities through tests no ethics committee would ever approve of if conducted on human subjects. Nonetheless, the nature of the axolotl remained elusive to Western scientists.

The Paradox of Extinction and Proliferation

The axolotl’s ability to thrive in captivity opened them up to an altogether different form of partnership. Slowly at first and then in a flash, the species entered the exotic pet trade. Their popularity reflects the longstanding predilection for domesticating nonhuman companions perceived as childlike. As Cortazar noted in 1956 though, there was, perhaps, something else alluring about the axolotl. There is an uncanny familiarity, maybe, in its naked flesh, or even in its refusal to emerge from a self-incurred immaturity.

In any case, it did not stop with hobbyists. By the turn of the millennium, the axolotl was ubiquitous, figuring in performance art by DBC Pierre, animated series like Bojack Horseman, video games like Minecraft, and social media like YouTube tutorials. Those wishing to be haunted by the cursed, lidless stare of Xolotl have plenty of options. Beyond challenging Western categories (including godliness and taxonomy), the axolotl’s infiltration of media culture urges us to rethink whether these supposed “extensions of man” are exclusively human.  

Before the axolotl proliferated in the cultural milieu of late capitalism though, they had nearly disappeared from the real world. While researchers readily reproduced the axolotl in captivity, there were neither private nor public incentives for their conservation. Thus as their space in laboratories grew and they loomed ever larger in popular and scientific imaginations, they simultaneously disappeared from their natural habitat.

Initial lack of interest in axolotl conservation means there is little historical data. However, a recent study confirms that colonial efforts to drain Xochilmilco beginning in the seventeenth century had a catastrophic impact. Further, rapid population growth in Mexico City in the second half of the twentieth century put more pressure on the already hyper-stressed, limited axolotl habitat.

Between the first robust survey of the species in 1998 and 2017, the axolotl’s population density plummeted from six thousand per square kilometer to fewer than thirty-five. The species is therefore “critically endangered.” A recent report suggests the population is now too small to detect and could be extinct in the wild by the end of 2025. The axolotl may become extinct at a time when its figure is more numerous than ever. Even in death the creature challenges dualism.

Making Sense of the Paradoxical Present

Many conclusions could be drawn from the axolotl’s paradoxical present. Through the lens of evolutionary history, the axolotl’s demise means no more than that of any other on the long list of species that have succumbed to the Anthropocene. Alternatively, a postcolonial critique would observe that Indigenous peoples and axolotls coexisted for thousands of years. It was thus the arrival of Spanish colonizers in the sixteenth century that was world-ending for the axolotl. We can also see the appropriation, commodification, and simulation of the axolotl as a symptom of late capitalism and its tendency to reduce life to capital. From this perspective, the reproduction of the salamander’s image in Mexican currency is particularly insidious.

In addition to being reductive, however, these explanations reproduce Western dualisms that, as the axolotl has shown time and again, are not conducive to the nuanced complexity of human engagement with more-than-human others. Put another way, such frameworks reify the notion that the nonhuman realm is separate from and subservient to its human counterpart. This holds true regardless of whether the axolotl is framed as a “natural species” lost to the “unnatural” Age of Man, a victim of colonial expansion, or raw matter for an insatiable market whose end is harder to imagine than that of the world itself.

I propose, instead, that engaging with the many ways in which figures like the axolotl continue to trouble totalizing dualisms may open pathways to alternative, ecologically-ethical futures. Consider, for example, the recent discovery that axolotls were once most abundant in parts of Xochimilco used for chinampa farming, an agricultural technique native to Mesoamerica. The axolotl’s predilection for these regenerative agricultural spaces contradicts Western understandings of agriculture as incompatible with wildlife. This finding also resonates with historical narratives of Tenochtitlan (the capital of the Aztec empire) as a radically sustainable city. It demonstrates that thriving human communities need not come at the expense of their ecological others.

We could also contemplate the axolotl’s nearly complete confinement to captivity in the context of late capitalism. Existing now in a state completely severed from the place in which it evolved, the axolotl has entered a kind of post-life, a limbo in which the creature that the Aztecs and conquistadors encountered is neither extant nor extinct. What does it mean for a lifeform to exist in total isolation from its ecological kin (the Eremocene, as E.O. Wilson calls it)? At this geologic junction, this question is of course relevant to humans as well.

Haraway would urge us to keep thinking through the axolotl and staying with its trouble. Still refusing to give up its life, Xolotl will almost certainly stay with us too, watching from the treated water of their aquaria. I could hardly wish for better company.

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Featured Image: An axolotl rests atop a partially submerged hand. Photo by Yaiol AI, 2025.

Alex Ventimilla is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His research focuses on cultural representations of biodiversity, conservation, and extinction with a focus on how these more-than-human entanglements are framed in documentary film. His work has been published in Animal Studies Journal and Langscape. Contact.