For the last 20 years, Dominican nuns in a Mexican monastery have cared for the largest known captive population of the critically endangered achoque salamander. Now scientists from Chester Zoo in the U.K. are collaborating with the sisters and Mexican conservationists to test a microchipping method that they hope will help them monitor the species’ dwindling wild population, reports Mongabay’s Liz Kimbrough.
Fewer than 150 adult achoque salamanders (Ambystoma dumerilii) are thought to remain in the wild, all of them in Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico’s central Michoacán state. Adding urgency to the situation, the lake is shrinking in size and growing increasingly polluted with sewage, fertilizer runoff and sediment from deforestation, Kimbrough reports.
In the 1980s, when Lake Pátzcuaro’s wild salamander population declined drastically, the Dominican sisters at the Monastery of Our Lady of Health began raising achoques in captivity at their monastery. They traditionally used achoques to produce a cough syrup, which became the convent’s main source of income.
Over the years, the nuns worked out how to get the salamanders to breed successfully in captivity, and how to raise their babies. Today, the breeding facility includes two rooms filled with tanks housing hundreds of salamanders at a time.
The Chester Zoo scientists wanted to use captive achoques to test a new tagging method — small, rice grain-sized microchips — before deploying them on wild individuals. If the microchipping was successful, the team planned to use the technique to tag wild achoques to ID and monitor them via a quick scan.
The researchers microchipped 80 captive salamanders in total across four sites; 28 in the monastery. “We were chipping them with the nuns watching protectively,” Adam Bland, assistant team manager for amphibians at Chester Zoo, said in a press release.
Individual achoques can be very difficult to identify since the salamanders don’t have natural markings unique to individuals, Kimbrough writes. Traditional scientific methods of marking amphibians, such as clipping toes, also fails in the salamanders since they regenerate lost tissue.
“Every [amphibian] species is unique, and marking techniques for amphibians often have to be species specific,” Bland told Kimbrough. “It’s also crucial that the process doesn’t affect the animals’ health.”
The microchipping experiment was successful: the microchips remained in place in 97.5% of achoques for more than 175 days, with no negative health effects.
The microchipping technique they used also allowed the researchers to tag achoques quickly without much handling stress, and the microchips can last for the salamander’s lifetime, Bland said.
Conservationists now plan to microchip all remaining wild achoques in Lake Pátzcuaro, so their health and population can be monitored more easily.
Read the full story by Liz Kimbrough here.
Banner image: Microchipping project brings high-tech hopes for the critically endangered achoque salamander. Image courtesy of Chester Zoo.
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