Apparently there are breeders making Axolotls and they only go for a few hundred bucks at most. How is this possible? And how are so many people able to own them as pets if they are very close to extinction?
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ELI5: Axolotls are easy to breed in captivity, but their problem is they only live in a very small lake to begin with. Since it is their habitat that is the issue just throwing more of them in wouldn’t fix anything, so them being pets has no effect on their status.
Axlotls’ wild range is extremely small. It was always very small, but currently it is down to a single lake that has been also greatly reduced in size and still sees human activity.
With a reduced volume of water you don’t just get a smaller area for a species to live in, you also cause pollutants to have a much larger effect than they would otherwise.
The IUCN has a single classification that could take pets into account, “Extinct in the Wild”, a species is EW when only captive specimes of it exist. This is sadly where axolotls are most likely headed given enough time. It is possible that their numbers will stabilize and stop going down, but they would still be endengared, as any change to their habitat could wipe them out, and that’s not even considering the effects of a reduced gene pool.
We should also consider axolotl habitats were altered to prevent floodings of areas were people live, so I don’t think most people arount there would be interested in undoing that change. Restoring a habitat is also not an easy process, I’m no expert but clearly you can’t just dump water back in. As for reintroduction efforts, that would never be able to fix their living conditions, which is the source of their endangerment.
Finally, to answer the question: as breeding pet axolotls do not detract from the wild population there is no issue with breeding already captive individuals. As for the price, that is as always a mix of how costly they are to “produce” and how many of them people want to buy. The axolotl is actually a very hardy creature that can live with minimal care in captivity and reproduces plentily (we are talking over 1000 eggs at a time), which is also what’s keeping it from going exctinct in the wild.
TL;DR: Simply put, the IUCN classifications do not deal with the number of captive individuals, but rather with their status in the wild. Axolotls are relatively easy and cheap to breed so they are not very expensive. Doing so with already captive individuals doesn’t have any impact on the wild population so that’s not an issue. Their problem is their habitat is all but gone, no number of axolotls being dumped into the Xochimilco can fix that.
edit: forgot to include the “eli5” part.
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