This TED Talk features science journalist Victoria Gill, recorded live at TED at NAS 2019.

Okay, I would like to introduce all of you beautiful, curious-minded people to my favorite animal in the world.

This is the Peter Pan of the amphibian world. It's an axolottle. So it's a type of salamander,

but it never fully grows up and climbs out of the water like other salamanders do.

And this little guy has X-Man-style powers, right? So if it loses any limb, it can just completely

regenerate. It's amazing. It's got a face with a permanent smile. It's framed by feathery gills.

It's just, how could you not love that? This particular type of acylotol, a very close relative, is known as an Achoket. It is equally as cute.

And it lives in just one place in a lake in the north of Mexico. It's called Lake

Pat Squarrow. It is stunningly beautiful. But unfortunately, it's been so overfished and so

badly polluted that the Achoke is dying out altogether. And this is something that's a scenario

that's playing out all over the world. We're living through an extinction crisis.

And species are particularly vulnerable when they're evolutionarily tailored to just one little niche or maybe one lake.

But this is TED, right?

So this is where I give you the big idea, the big solution.

So how do you save one special weird species from going extinct?

Well, the answer, at least my answer, isn't a grand technological intervention.

It's actually really simple.

It's that you find people who know all about this animal, and you ask them, and you listen to them.

And you work with them if they're up for that. So I want to tell you about how I've

seen that in science and in conservation in particular, if scientists don't team up with local people

who have really valuable knowledge, but a practical wisdom that's not going to be published

in any academic journal, they can really miss the point.

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