For two decades, Dominican nuns in central Mexico have quietly kept the world's largest population of critically endangered achoque salamanders alive. Now they're partnering with researchers from Chester Zoo in the UK to test a new way of tracking the species in the wild — before it's too late.
Fewest than 150 adult achoques remain in Lake Pátzcuaro, a shrinking body of water in Michoacán state. The lake is choking on sewage, fertilizer runoff, and sediment from deforestation. The salamanders, found nowhere else on Earth, are running out of time.
The story of how these amphibians survived this long is itself a kind of miracle. In the 1980s, as the wild population crashed, the sisters at the Monastery of Our Lady of Health began raising achoques in captivity. They originally kept them to produce a medicinal cough syrup — the convent's main source of income. But over the years, something shifted. The nuns learned how to breed them successfully, how to raise the delicate babies. Today, two rooms in the monastery are filled with tanks housing hundreds of salamanders.
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Start Your News DetoxThat captive population is now the lifeline for the species. And it's become the testing ground for a new conservation tool: microchips the size of a grain of rice.
The Chester Zoo team wanted to perfect the tagging technique on captive achoques before implanting them in wild individuals. If successful, the microchips would let researchers identify and monitor each remaining salamander — a crucial step when you're trying to save a population this small. The collaboration brings together three unlikely partners: British zoo scientists, Mexican conservationists, and nuns who've been doing this work for two decades without much fanfare.
What makes this moment significant isn't just the technology. It's the recognition that sometimes conservation happens in the most unexpected places — in monastery tanks, in the hands of people who chose to care for a species when nobody else was paying attention. The microchipping project is a way of scaling that commitment, of turning decades of quiet dedication into data that could inform how the species is managed for the next 20 years.
The wild population is so small that every individual matters. Every salamander tagged is one more data point, one more reason to protect what remains of Lake Pátzcuaro.
