Nuns, scientists & microchips: An alliance to save Mexico’s achoque salamanders

In a monastery beside a 16th-century basilica in Pátzcuaro, Mexico, Dominican nuns move between rows of aquarium tanks, checking water quality and feeding earthworms to hundreds of brown salamanders with flowing gills. Sister Ofelia Morales Francisco has cared for the critically endangered achoque salamander (Ambystoma dumerilii) for nearly 20 years. She and her team have mastered the amphibians’ complex reproductive biology, raising generation after generation in tanks that have become an unexpected ark. This species, the achoque (pronounced ah-choke-eh), is known from only one lake on the planet, Lake Pátzcuaro in Mexico’s central Michoacán state. Scientists estimate that fewer than 150 adults remain in the wild. However, the monastery boasts a colony of around 300 salamanders, represent