awwww look at that cute lil guy
It's a mudkip!! I'm sure you've seen the memes, but if you didn't already know... mudkips are based on a REAL ANIMAL! The Axolotl from Mexico.
They're a critically endangered species and that could possibly be completely extinct in the wild.
Rewind 500 years and the area we now call Mexico City looked quite different. There was a giant lake perhaps 80 miles long and 20 miles wide. On an island inside this lake was the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. This lake was the native habitat of the mudkip, the place where they were cut off from other species and evolved into the freaky badasses we know today. After the Spanish conquered the city and killed everyone on the island they decided the whole "lake" thing was too much of a hassle and started draining it so they wouldn't need boats to bring stuff to the city.
After a few hundred years in the 1800s the once massive lake had shrunk into three smaller lakes as shown below:
Unfortunately for our cute mudkip friends, lake Chalco still flooded occasionally which was a BIG HASSLE for the people who decided to build a city in the drained basin surrounding what once was an island... so they drained it completely.
The axolotl is only native to Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco in central Mexico. Unfortunately for the axolotl, Lake Chalco no longer exists, as it was artificially drained to avoid periodic flooding
In the 90s there were thousands of mudkips found in the wild, in 2010 there were only hundreds, and in 2013 a 4 month survey couldn't find a single one. It's likely that the remaining few in the lakes and rivers around what is now Mexico City were killed due to pollution.
Oops
