File 0005/2026 · Re: proposed amendment · To: Conference of the Parties
Proposal: make the axolotl a budgie
This blog mocks paperwork a lot. It's only fair to propose something in return. The proposal is short and requires inventing nothing: CITES has done it before.
The precedent
Every parrot in the world is on CITES Appendix II. Every one except four: the budgerigar, the cockatiel, the rosy-faced lovebird and the rose-ringed parakeet. Those four aren't in the Appendices at all. Why? Because they're bred in cages by the million, and nobody believes a pet-shop budgie threatens a wild one in Australia.
In other words: the convention already accepts that when an animal is mass-bred in captivity, asking each specimen for papers protects nothing.
Why the axolotl qualifies better than the budgie
| Budgie | Axolotl | |
|---|---|---|
| Wild population | Millions, across a continent | A few dozen per km², in a single canal system |
| Captive breeding | Massive | Massive, since 1864 |
| Risk of a tank specimen being a "laundered" wild one | Low | Near zero outside Mexico: there's nowhere to take one from |
| Tank colours | Many | Leucistic (from a single 1863 founder), albino and golden (from a tiger salamander), and one that glows green |
That last row deserves detail. The pet-shop albino axolotl doesn't just not exist in Xochimilco: its albinism isn't even axolotl. The gene entered the lab colony in the sixties, through crosses with tiger salamanders. And there are lab lines carrying a jellyfish gene that makes them glow green under UV light. To CITES, both are Ambystoma mexicanum, Appendix II, with the same paperwork as a specimen taken from a canal.
An albino axolotl is, genetically, an axolotl with a bit of tiger salamander. A fluorescent green axolotl is an axolotl with a bit of jellyfish. Neither could have come from Xochimilco. Both need papers.
Where the paper does work
In Mexico. It's the only place on Earth with wild axolotls, and therefore the only place a wild one can enter trade. Control makes sense there, and it should be serious. But once a lineage has spent generations outside Mexico, every new permit in Madrid, Berlin or Buenos Aires certifies something everyone already knows: that the animal was born in a tank.
The proposal
Two versions, so nobody can call us extremists:
Either one frees breeders, labs, shops, customs and police from a procedure that protects no axolotl. And it leaves all the effort where it matters: the water in Xochimilco.
Forward to the CoP
Sources: CITES Appendices, Psittaciformes (exceptions for Agapornis roseicollis, Melopsittacus undulatus, Nymphicus hollandicus and Psittacula krameri); Woodcock et al. (2017), Scientific Reports, on tiger salamander DNA in the lab axolotl; Sobkow et al. (2006), Developmental Biology, on GFP transgenic axolotls.