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Protesters participate in the “Reunite Our Families Now” rally against continued deportations, demanding family reunifications in Los Angeles in March 2021.

Some 5,600 families were intentionally separated in immigration detention under President Trump in 2017 and 2018 after they tried to cross the southern US border without authorization, and hundreds have yet to be reunited. Children taken from their parents were placed in foster care, the homes of relatives in the US, and federal detention centers, while their parents were detained separately.

The Biden administration has created a task force to reunite families that remain separated, successfully reuniting 61 children with their families as of November, and issued a callout to the public asking for recommendations on how to ensure that family separations never happen again. It’s also currently offering affected families counseling and permission to live and work in the US for three years.

But the administration withdrew from monthslong settlement talks with separated families in December after Biden dismissed the idea of delivering payouts as high as $450,000, an amount that the DOJ was reportedly considering at the time.

For those families, that $450,000 figure reflected the price of dealing with what could be lifelong psychological and health consequences of the trauma of separation and, in some cases of separated children, physical and sexual abuse they experienced while in foster care and in US custody. Republicans nevertheless seized on the issue, seeking to weaponize it against Biden and arguing that a settlement “would financially reward aliens who broke our laws” and “encourage more lawlessness” at the southern border.

The DOJ has since made a clear reversal. It has argued in court that, despite the fact that the US has condemned the policy, the separations were lawful. In further arguments, the DOJ said affected families aren’t entitled to payouts from the government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which allows people who have suffered due to negligence or wrongdoing by the federal government to sue for financial damages.

“At issue in this case is whether adults who entered the country without authorization can challenge the federal government’s enforcement of federal immigration laws,” the Justice Department said in a January 7 brief in the Pennsylvania lawsuit. “They cannot.”

The DOJ is now on track to take the cases to trial, prolonging any possible resolution and potentially leaving families empty-handed.

“It’s very frustrating. This is going to take a really long time,” said Conchita Cruz, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, which has brought two cases seeking compensation for separated families and will likely file more. “Had the government not represented that it intended to settle these cases initially, I think a lot of families would have been much farther along [in the court process], some might even have already won in court, and they would be in a different situation. Now, some families are in a worse position for having waited a year later with nothing to show for it.”

The administration has also requested to transfer the cases from California and Pennsylvania to courts in border states such as Texas, where Trump filled every existing federal judicial vacancy with conservative judges. That creates more hurdles for families who don’t live in those states to continue to pursue their cases, though Cruz says it probably won’t stop them.

“You’re basically putting people in a situation where, in order to fight this case, you’re going to have to take a week off work and go to another state in the middle of a pandemic for a trial,” Cruz said. “You’re going to have to fly to the place where your trauma began and have to recount the worst moments of your life and likely have to be separated from your family to do it. It’s going to be a major disruption in your life.”

Though Biden has promised to make amends for these families’ suffering, his administration continues to contribute to it.

John Minchillo/AP

The face of President Donald Trump appears on large screens as supporters participate in a rally in front of the White House prior to marching to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

In this line of thinking, the many other issues liberals care about — voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, the Senate’s rural skew, Trump’s election in the first place — pale in importance when compared to the attempted theft of 2020. Institutional biases or voter suppression might affect election outcomes on the margin. But election theft is about throwing out the results entirely. That arguably should make it the most dangerous scenario for democracy, at least in the short term, as my colleague Zack Beauchamp writes.

Though the mob at the Capitol rightfully got much attention, many experts don’t think the mob itself is the main problem. “The looming danger is not that the mob will return; it’s that mainstream Republicans will ‘legally’ overturn an election,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote at the Atlantic last year. That means stealing an election, but through institutions like election officials, legislatures, or Congress, not through brute force.

Trump tried to pressure officials at all these levels to try and throw out Biden’s wins, but his efforts failed. The question is whether he, or someone else, could succeed next time. His supporters are trying to replace various GOP officials who upheld the results with hardcore believers in his narrative of election fraud, or cynics more willing to pander to such beliefs.

If you believe this threat looms above all, then addressing vulnerabilities in the system is paramount. So Democrats should jump at Republicans’ offer to discuss reforming the Electoral Count Act, the antiquated law Trump tried to use to get Congress and Vice President Pence to throw out results. The specific details of said reforms will matter a great deal, but as Rick Hasen writes at Slate, it’s worth getting talks rolling, rather than scoffing at them, as some Democratic leaders have so far.

But the greater threat of a stolen election might come in the states — either from partisan state officials who refuse to certify rightful results, or state legislators who block the winner’s electors. If either happens, it’s not clear the courts will intervene to set things right, since many conservatives argue states have ultimate authority over their own elections.

If possible (it may not be), it would be worth trying to include protections against state election theft in Electoral Count Act reforms. But there’s no foolproof solution. The system will only work if enough people in power agree to let it work. So one key test will be in whether Republicans who stood up to Trump, like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, can survive primary challenges. Retaining a core of elites in the Republican Party who respect democratic norms is crucially important. Much could also hinge on whether Trump himself runs again and wins the GOP nomination.

Tasos Katopodis/AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump and then-Sen. David Perdue at Nationals Park in Washington, DC, on October 27, 2019. Trump has endorsed Perdue in his campaign for governor of Georgia over incumbent Republican Gov.  Brian Kemp after bitterness over Joe Biden’s 2020 win in Georgia.

The threat of minority rule

Yet many Democrats, activists, and academics aren’t just worried about elections being outright stolen. They’re also concerned that Republicans could consistently win elections while lacking a majority of overall votes nationwide. This, they argue, is an affront to the core democratic principle that a majority should prevail, and to the idea that some people’s votes shouldn’t be worth more than others.

Lately, many United States’s electoral institutions have given the GOP an advantage. “The GOP has dropped any pretense of trying to appeal to a majority of Americans,” writes Ari Berman of Mother Jones. “Instead, recognizing that the structure of America’s political institutions diminishes the influence of urban areas, young Americans, and voters of color, it caters to a conservative white minority that is drastically overrepresented in the Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandered legislative districts.”

In 2020, Biden won the popular vote by more than 4 percentage points, but only barely eked out a win in the tipping point Electoral College state. The median states were even a bit more tilted toward the GOP, suggesting the party has a 4- to 6-point advantage in competition for the Senate. Gerrymandering will likely continue to give the GOP a narrow advantage in the House of Representatives and far greater advantages in some swing state legislatures. And we shouldn’t forget the conservative- dominated Supreme Court, which has three justices appointed by a president who never won a majority of the nationwide vote.)

This is a frustrating state of affairs for Democrats, but is it a fundamental threat to democracy comparable to that of stolen elections? The US has never had a system where the popular vote dictated these outcomes. Republicans (including those who criticized Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election) argue that they have been playing by the long-established rules of the game, and that Democrats are simply upset that they are losing. Democrats argue back that the rules are unfair because they disadvantage nonwhite voters.

Whatever the arguments, there are few plausible solutions. The party’s filibustered election bill would have reformed House gerrymandering, but it left these other institutions untouched. Other proposals preferred by some on the left, such as adding new states to the Senate and packing the Supreme Court, didn’t even make the cut. The most popular idea for reforming the Electoral College — a “compact” among states to give their electors to the popular vote winner — isn’t going anywhere unless Democrats seize power in many more swing states.

There are some arguments that these problems are surmountable without big reforms. The current round of redistricting probably won’t be as bad for Democrats as many expected in the House (some state legislatures are another story, though). And the Electoral College bias is hardly set in stone — Democrats had a slight advantage in it compared to the popular vote in 2004, 2008, and 2012. Democrats’ woes there, as in the Senate, are in large part a Trump-era problem brought on by a sharp increase in the polarization of the electorate by education.

Yet reversing that trend would likely require a change in the party’s political coalition. They’d have to get significantly better at appealing to the non-college-educated voters, particularly white voters, whose power is amplified by these institutions, as Democratic data guru David Shor has argued. For the foreseeable future, the conversation about reforming the Electoral College or the Senate is a dead end — no constitutional convention is coming to save us. Democrats’ only option is to try to win despite their disadvantages.

The threat of voter suppression

Another threat that’s gotten enormous attention from Democrats, advocates, and experts this year is voter suppression. They argue that Republicans have a longtime practice of trying to effectively trying to distort the electorate, making it harder for certain voters (especially young, poor, nonwhite, and immigrant voters) to actually cast their ballots, so the GOP can have a better shot at winning.

This effort accelerated in 2021 with a set of new laws in GOP-controlled states. Some toughened voter ID requirements, some are reduced the time in which mail ballots can be requested, some limited drop boxes, some made it easier to “purge” voter rolls. Republicans claim they’re simply rolling back pandemic expansions or trying to combat possible fraud, but occasionally a Republican admits these measures are aimed at helping their party win.

Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images
Protesters rally in Washington, DC, on August 28, 2021, to demand protection for voting rights on the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Biden and others have compared these laws to the old Jim Crow laws of the South. “We feel if they can do these voting rights laws and other voting rights laws, we will never have a majority,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer recently told the Washington Post. And the provisions of certain new laws that could enable partisan election subversion — election theft — could be quite dangerous.

But whatever Republicans’ malign intentions or Democrats’ fears, the real-world effects of voter suppression provisions on election outcomes seem likely to be considerably less dramatic. “There is very little that politicians can do to alter election administration in such a way that it would have a permanent, obvious effect on turnout or the composition of the electorate,” MIT political scientist Charles Stewart told my colleague Ian Millhiser last year.

There simply haven’t been big variations in state election outcomes based on how much early or mail voting states have — it just doesn’t seem to matter much, because people largely adapt to the new rules. Study after study has found that voter ID laws have little effect on outcomes. And it isn’t the case anymore, if it ever was, that high-turnout elections are self- evidently bad for Republicans, given the parties’ changing coalitions and recent voting patterns.

Some political scientists are still worried. Charlotte Hill, Jake Grumbach, Hakeem Jefferson, and Adam Bonica write that it’s “not at all clear” that voter suppression policies have little impact. They posit that perhaps outcomes don’t change “because grassroots groups have invested ever-greater resources” to overcome barriers to voting, and such investment might not be sustainable.

Furthermore, expanding and standardizing voting accessibility can be a worthwhile and important thing to do regardless of its partisan effects or impact on outcomes. Provisions of these laws, like the Georgia one that bans giving away food and water to people waiting in line at a polling place, can be cruel and arbitrary. And if an election is close enough, even policies with very small effects could theoretically tip the outcome. But major transformations of the electorate in these states from policies of this kind seem unlikely.

The threat of the irresponsible party

Finally, some liberals would define the threat to democracy in even more worrying terms. It wouldn’t just be a stolen election, or a Republican win without a majority of votes — any Republican victory at all is a threat, because of what the GOP might use its powers to do next time around.

“There’s something deep to confront about the aberrant nature of this particular faction and political formation that is the primary problem that all others flow from,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently argued on The Ezra Klein Show.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, center, and other members of the House Republican Conference arrive for a news conference outside the US Capitol on July 29, 2021.

Trump’s actions, and the willingness of so much of the GOP to excuse or accommodate them, indeed go a long way toward making the case that the GOP may well not respect future election results if it’s in power. The more difficult question is what can be even done about this. “What do you do in a two-party system if one coalition is not fully committed to democracy?” Hayes continued.

The solution Democrats would prefer, of course, is that everyone should just vote for Democrats. But as recent election results and polling numbers suggest, that likely won’t work. The Republican Party is going to stick around and remain competitive in the future, at the state level and nationally. The grand, final defeat of Trump or the GOP, either electorally or legislatively, is a pipe dream.

Some have mused about electoral reforms like a top 5 ranked-choice system, which perhaps could give GOP moderates a path to the general election. But the forces pushing the GOP in extreme directions, such as identity- based polarization and media dynamics, are broad and unlikely to be solved by policy tweaks.

So for those who believe the Democratic Party and the forces of democracy are permanently locked in combat with an extremist GOP, there’s not a comforting prescription. Whether this will change depends on the GOP itself.

But at least when it comes to election theft, there’s a counterargument that the party isn’t yet lost. In particular, key Republicans with positions of authority to affect the results largely didn’t use their formal powers to help Trump steal the election. Swing state governors, state officials, state legislative leaders, GOP-appointed judges, Senate leaders, and Justice Department leaders let Biden’s win through. Many in the party postured irresponsibly, some sought to use their power corruptly, but it’s not the case that the GOP is a well- oiled election-stealing machine: at least not yet.

If Trump is deposed or retires, and is replaced by a less conspiracy-addled, norm-breaking, boundary-pushing party leader, that could help. If the party accepts that they’re making gains among nonwhite and other low-propensity voters and stops trying to suppress their turnout, that would be nice. If high-ranking members of the party who oppose election theft and respect democratic norms manage to hold on to their positions, rather than being purged, that would be encouraging.

Trump’s coup last time around was stopped, in large part, because Republican elected officials stopped it. Whether they will do so again is not really something Democrats or liberals can control. They can only hope for the best — and fear for the worst.

This paradox — that axolotls seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time — raises a vexing question. If an animal is thriving in labs and aquariums, should we worry that it’s dying in its native waters? Or, asked another way: How important is the “wild” in wildlife?

Most searches for wild axolotls now end in failure, Luis Zambrano, a leading axolotl researcher at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), told me last year. They’re simply too rare. Yet in November, I set out for Xochimilco (pronounced so-chee-MEEL-ko) in the south of Mexico City. I wanted to learn the lessons of axolotls in their natural habitat, and I had a hunch I might get lucky.

Some endangered animals live deep in the rainforest, far from civilization. Not the axolotl. The salamander resides in narrow canals that surround farms called chinampas, or “floating gardens,” and provide water for the crops and a way to travel. With its skinny streets and wooden boats ferrying people around, Xochimilco feels a bit like Venice, but with the added smell of freshly cooked tamales and the crow of roosters.

A farmer moves his wooden boat through a canal in Xochimilco, a borough of Mexico City, in November 2021.

The Indigenous Mexica were among the peoples who built the chinampas hundreds of years ago, when they ruled what Europeans dubbed the Aztec Empire. At a time when the city was home to five large lakes, axolotls thrived in the canals and the Mexicas used them as a source of food and medicine. They also revered the salamanders as spiritual beings and living representations of the god Xolotl — the dog-headed twin of Quetzalcoatl, one of their most important deities. (One creation myth suggests Xolotl transformed himself into different plants and animals to avoid being sacrificed, and his final form before he was found and killed was an axolotl.)

The Spanish invasion and centuries of colonization eroded traditional farming and changed the city’s unique ecosystem. As Mexico City grew, the lakes started drying up, sewage and agricultural chemicals fouled the waters, and two kinds of introduced fish multiplied in the canals. Today, the majority of farmers use fertilizers and pesticides, and most water in Xochimilco can’t support many native species. The animals that survive have to compete with invasive fish, which also eat axolotls.

Wandering the narrow streets of Xochimilco one afternoon, I asked locals where to find the salamanders. I eventually got a lead: I might find them near the intersection of two major waterways to the north. I crossed a few canals filled with dark, fetid water before the directions led me to a dimly lit room. It housed a small owl, turtles, and several tanks of the iconic salamanders. So much for wild axolotls.

As a swarm of tourists gathered around, I thought about the gulf between ecosystems and the human idea of nature. Here we were in the axolotl’s native land, gawking at their features as though they were somehow exotic. It’s easy to forget that these creatures were ever wild and part of a large community when they now live behind glass. It’s easy to forget that Earth’s rarest species share the same web of life as humans.

I had more luck in my search when I visited a farm owned by Felipe Barrera Aguirre, a farmer and veterinarian who wears his thick, black hair in a bun. He told me that he was restoring a population of axolotls in a canal on his land. On a chilly morning, I climbed into a wooden boat bound for Barrera Aguirre’s farm with photographer Luis Antonio Rojas.

Farmers travel through the early morning mist on a canal in Xochimilco in November 2021.
A white heron rests by the edge of a canal in Xochimilco.

Mist blanketed the canal as our boat cut through the water and the sun rose through the haze. A large egret resting on the bank took flight as we cruised by.

Half an hour later we arrived at his farm, which was small but exquisite. He led us past tall sunflowers, bright-red cherry tomatoes, and dew-covered spider webs to a small canal filled with aquatic plants. Stay silent and watch, Barrera Aguirre told me.

Axolotls are unusual even when compared to their amphibian brethren. While many salamanders morph into terrestrial creatures when they reach adulthood — losing their gills, fins, and other aquatic features in exchange for a body better suited to land — axolotls usually don’t. Most live their whole lives underwater, as if they never grow up. Fortunately for admirers on land, they still often come up for air.

Waiting for rare wildlife to show up is a test of patience. But in the stillness, I noticed life all around me, from an iridescent beetle scaling a blade of grass to shrimp-like animals zipping through the water. This, I thought, is what biodiversity looks like — countless plants, animals, and microbes all doing their own thing in a complex network.

Felipe Barrera Aguirre, with his camera at the ready, waits for an axolotl to appear in a canal in his chinampa one early morning in November 2021.
A wild axolotl swims to the surface of a canal in Barrera Aguirre’s chinampa.

An hour or so in, just as I was giving up hope, a brown axolotl broke the surface. It drew a quick breath into its open mouth before retreating into the darkness. Then another appeared, about the size of a banana. For a split second, I stared at one of the rarest wild animals on Earth.

If axolotls are so rare in the wild, how did they become common everywhere else? The story begins in the 1860s, when a French expedition, tasked with exploring Mexico’s resources, brought 34 axolotls from Mexico City to a zoo in Paris, according to a history of axolotl research. Scientists and naturalists went on to breed those salamanders and distribute them around Europe, and by the 1870s they were found in all European countries — and eventually the US.

Remarkably, most axolotls under human care descended from that single group of fewer than three dozen (although over the years, scientists have bred a few wild axolotls and even tiger salamanders into the captive population). Wild axolotls are typically dark brown, whereas lab and pet animals are often white or pink. There are also genetic differences between the two groups, according to Randal Voss, an axolotl researcher at the University of Kentucky. 

    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jptQ-

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An axolotl rests inside a piece of PVC pipe in a tank at Jessica Whited’s lab at Harvard University.

Not long after the French expedition, scientists made axolotls a staple of medical research. In fact, “axolotls were already mundane participants in laboratory life” when a scientist named Thomas Hunt Morgan first started studying the iconic fruit fly in the 1910s, according to the historical account. Early on, researchers used these salamanders to study the development of embryos and the hormone thyroxine. Now, they’re common in regeneration research.

More recently, axolotls found fame in Western popular culture. They’re sought-after pets with a massive social media following: the hashtag #axolotl has 1.8 billion views on TikTok. (I highly recommend this video, in which a drawing of a chef’s hat turns an axolotl into a tiny chef.) Axolotls also star in an ever-growing list of websites and games, including the hugely popular game Axie Infinity, in which users collect, breed, and battle cartoon axolotls. Some players have earned more in the game than in their traditional jobs.

Axolotls are no less iconic in Mexico, where they’re depicted in murals throughout Mexico City. The salamander is even the city’s official emoji and appears on the country’s new 50-peso note.

A mural of an axolotl in the Nativitas neighborhood of Xochimilco.
A man walks past a mural of an axolotl in the Caltongo neighborhood of Xochimilco.

But fame has done little to save them. The animal that most people know and love isn’t wild, but a captive creature, which doesn’t help them in Xochimilco. “Everybody says we have to save the axolotl, but they don’t care much about the ecosystems in which they live,” Zambrano said.

For 15 years now, Mexican scientists like Zambrano have been teaming up with farmers like Barrera Aguirre to rebuild populations of axolotls in their native waters. They aim to restore canals and revive traditional farming practices; for example, by planting a wider range of crops and spraying fewer chemicals. The ultimate goal is to release axolotls back into the wild where they can survive and breed.

On a hot November afternoon, I met Crescencio Hernández at his farm in a neighborhood of Xochimilco called San Gregorio. Not long ago, Hernández used chemical fertilizers and pesticides to grow his crops, which polluted the canals surrounding his farm. Then he started working with Carlos Uriel Sumano Arias, one of Zambrano’s colleagues. Sumano Arias helped Hernández use fewer chemicals, adopt natural fertilizers, and build a rudimentary filter that cleans the canal and prevents the unwanted fish from entering.

Carlos Uriel Sumano Arias checks the clarity of the water from a canal in Xochimilco in November 2021. He helps farmers in the area clean up their canals and build refuges for axolotls.

I made sure not to step on young stems of broccoli and kale as I walked along the canal. A green frog croaked and jumped into the water and, on the far bank, I saw a small water snake — hardly thicker than a string of yarn — slip into the grass.

Sumano Arias, a man in his 30s wearing a Panama hat, pulled up a few aquatic plants with roots that looked like glass noodles. “They smell good,” he said, lifting them to his nose and then passing them to me. That means the water is clean, he added. Sumano Arias plans to follow in Barrera Aguirre’s footsteps and introduce axolotls here in April.

Seedlings growing in a chinampa in Xochimilco. 
    <img alt=" " src="https://cdn.vox-
cdn.com/thumbor/UReDWFYZTCbtGXPYYMAmnv1scQM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox- cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23165974/LuisARojas_Xochimilco_34.jpg" />
A butterfly rests on a marigold in a chinampa in Xochimilco.
Sumano Arias checks the roots of aquatic plants from a canal bordering a chinampa.
A rudimentary filter keeps pollution, sediment, and unwanted fish out of a canal.

Axolotls don’t directly benefit farmers or ecosystems in some grand or obvious way. Rather, they’re an indicator species, almost like a canary in a coal mine. No axolotls probably means dirty water. And like other native animals, they’re part of a complex system. Their absence is like a broken cog in a finely tuned machine.

What’s bad for these salamanders is also bad for people, Zambrano added. Farmers in Xochimilco have a hard time selling produce because “the public believes these products are polluted,” he wrote in a recent paper. That’s pushed many of them to use more agrochemicals and prioritize quantity over quality, or to abandon their farms altogether. Those who take over the abandoned plots often dump sewage into the canals, he wrote, which makes the water even dirtier and feeds a vicious cycle of habitat loss.

The flip side is that restoring the ecosystems here — fixing many faulty cogs at once — also benefits farmers and those who buy their crops. An ecosystem that sustains axolotls can produce clean water for healthier, better-tasting produce, said Esperanza Hernández Flores, Crescencio’s sister, who also works on the farm.

“Water availability and quality are as important to axolotls as they are to local people who grow crops within Xochimilco,” Zambrano wrote in 2015.

Returning axolotls to the land is also a kind of cultural revival, Agustin Galacio Gonzalez, another farmer who participates in the UNAM program, told me. “It’s an important species for the heritage of the area.”

Luis Zambrano, an ecologist at UNAM who leads a project to create refuges for axolotls in Xochimilco, at his office in Mexico City in November 2021.

Zambrano aims to get at least 200 farmers to join the project, but that may be a challenge: Farmers told me that the market for natural products in Mexico is small and hard to access, and that eco-friendly methods tend to produce fewer crops. There are also other kinds of waste, such as sewage and pollution from new buildings, that dirty the canals, Zambrano acknowledged.

Nonetheless, Zambrano and his team have hope for Xochimilco’s axolotls. Just 15 years ago, relatively few people knew about these salamanders, he said, and now they’re showing up in the news and popular culture. That’s put Xochimilco on the map, he said. The urbanites of Mexico City are starting to realize that important species live in their own backyard, not just in distant protected areas, Zambrano added.

When helping animals also helps humans, these kinds of projects can work, he told me. When efforts to save species pit environmentalists against local communities, they fail. “You have to work with the people inside,” Zambrano said. “They have to own the project.”

Two axolotls that morphed into land-based salamanders in a fish tank at UNAM’s ecological restoration laboratory in November 2021.

Zambrano has an axolotl aquarium at his lab at UNAM. When I visited, I noticed two salamanders that were out of the water and seemed to be missing their external gills. Sometimes axolotls follow their amphibian cousins and transform into land-based creatures. It’s a response to stresses like changes in water quality, Voss, of the University of Kentucky, said. While salamanders may look fragile, they’re actually pretty resilient. Maybe they do stand a fighting chance.

Jessica Whited, a professor of regenerative biology at Harvard, has a thing for axolotls. Her office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is decorated with axolotl paintings, and a cloth cape embroidered with an axolotl hangs in the corner. On a coffee table near the door, there’s a small jar filled with axolotl feet next to a glass container of Tootsie Pops.

Whited leads one of the largest axolotl labs in the country. She met me on a cold and rainy fall morning, talking rapidly about salamander science and often erupting into laughter. There were thousands of axolotls a few floors below us, she told me, in a room she calls “the baby factory.”

Courtesy of Hani Singer

Researcher Jessica Whited in the lab she leads at Harvard, where she studies limb regeneration in axolotls.

Whited is chasing what she calls a “holy grail”: the regeneration of human limbs. “People losing limbs in the United States due to disease is an ever-increasing problem,” she said. “There’s simply nothing that would be as perfect as coaxing the human limb to regenerate.” Her own grandfather underwent several amputations linked to peripheral artery disease before he passed away in his early 60s.

This work is possible because the anatomy of an axolotl is surprisingly similar to our own, Whited said, holding the jar of salamander feet to the light. “We are discovering how these animals actually regenerate limbs,” she said. “Then we can take this information and say which parts of this process are not happening in humans.”

Whited has no doubt that humans will eventually be able to regenerate their own limbs. “The question is just when,” she said. Now, her team is trying to identify what part of the axolotl genome — which, curiously, is about 10 times the size of the human genome — controls regeneration.

“The biggest discoveries are yet to come,” she said.

Courtesy of Hani Singer

An axolotl limb five days into regeneration.

Courtesy of Hani Singer

An axolotl limb 35 days into regeneration.

In Whited’s brightly lit lab, thousands of axolotls live in hundreds of containers on shelves. The young ones, which were around 2 inches long and wriggled in small plastic tubs, had partially transparent skin — I could see right through to their intestines, which looked like brains.

We were far from the wild axolotls that still live in the canals of Xochimilco. But I knew that these two worlds were deeply connected. Whited’s research — and so much of what we know about human and animal biology — wouldn’t have been possible without the wild animals that Mexican scientists and farmers are racing to save. What other secrets does the vast, wild world hold?

Cutting-edge medical research may one day give people a healthier life. But if Zambrano and Barrera Aguirre are right, so will reviving some of the traditional farming methods in Xochimilco. We need both the old and the new — the chinampas and the Harvard labs.

Felipe Barrera Aguirre takes an early morning walk through his chinampa in Xochimilco.

On Barrera Aguirre’s farm, every plant and animal served a purpose. Bees from his hives pollinate the crops, fennel attracts wasps that scare away insect pests, and axolotls keep the aquatic food chain in balance by feasting on smaller organisms, he told me.

Biodiversity wasn’t a concept for him — it was a way of life. “It’s very easy to understand the importance of biodiversity,” Barrera Aguirre said while stacking fresh-picked cherry tomatoes. “Each tomato is like a piece in a tower. When it becomes unstable, it falls.”

Luis Antonio Rojas contributed reporting to this article.

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