I know it’s a holiday here in the States, but there’s art to be done so that I can declare my own independence from the book later on this week.
So here is the wonderful axolotl! The story behind this piece is “missed connections”. The axolotl is believed to be extinct in the wild because the very few freshwater bodies they lived in were either drained or polluted with fertilizer run-off, which is pretty awful. The plus side is that there are lots of them in captivity, because they make for good test models for regeneration research and there are efforts being made to create a genetically diverse colony that can be released back into the wild.
So, perhaps these were the last two axolotls in the wild, and they could have saved their species… if not for this missed connection.