Hey, it's Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Today in the podcast, a quest to save one of the world's most beloved amphibians.

When you try to collect them and you don't find anything,

then you hate them until you start to understand them and start to understand why it's so important for Mexican culture.

They're one of the most charismatic amphibians out there.

They're crawling all over your social media with those little black guys and that goofy smile and that poofy red gill scarf.

I know the sci-fri crowd knows what I'm talking about. The axolottle. What you probably didn't know is that the only place in the world

you can find them in the wild is in Lake Sochimilco. But their numbers are dwindling and scientists

are working on many fronts to protect them,

from collaborations with farmers to creating refuges to capturing environmental DNA or eDNA to try to track them down.

Here to tell us about this mission to protect the axolotls are my guests.

Dr. Luis Sambrano is one of the world's leading

axolotel experts and an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. And Dr. Alejandro

Maeda Obregone, a molecular ecologist at the University College London, who is studying

rare and endangered species. I want to welcome you both to Science Friday. Thank you very much.

Hi, Florida. Yeah, thank you for having us and yeah, excited to talk about our project.

Luis, let's start with you. If axoladils are only living in this one lake, I mean, how big is the

wild population at this point? Well, it used to be very large, Actually, when I started to study them, we calculated that they were about 1,000

axolotos per kilometer square.

That was in 2004.

And 10 years ago, the last census we made officially was 36 per kilometer square.

So in the wild, there are very, very small amount of number of organisms.

...