Question: Captive v. Wild?

Alright I'm doing a massive research paper/presentation on axolotls--it's essentially my culminating project for high school.
I'm having a little trouble finding information, so I figured I'd come here. Any help you can provide would be ridiculously amazing! Every bit of information has to be cited, so any websites you can provide me with that answer these questions would be extremely useful.

Questions I have:
What's the difference between a captive-bred and a wild axolotl? Be specific please, not things like 'size'.

Why should we care whether the wild axolotl goes extinct when it's bred in captivity? (I know we should, I'm not saying that. I just need good, concrete reasons, preferably with research or sources to back them up.)

ANYTHING on their regeneration (once again, websites would be awesome! I love to read about this stuff, I'm just having trouble finding information that's credible):
How fast is it on average?
What exactly is happening with the cells?
Where is it studied (what colleges)?
What does it mean for humans/the future of medicine?

Thank you so much in advance!

Wild axolotls historically were the top predator in their small ecosystem. Without the top predator in place, the balance of prey species is upset. For example (historically), if axolotls disappeared, daphnia populations would explode, leading to a huge decrease in algal colonies in the water, leading to a crash in dissolved oxygen, which would rebound up through the ranks again, causing everything that wasn't air breathing to crash because it's starved for oxygen.

Of course, now axolotls are not the key predator, and the system is again being upset by removing that link.

Physiologically, there's little difference between a captive bred (genetically pure) axolotl and a wild one. Wild individuals tend to be smaller, as captivity allows for better nutrition and a lack of predation (from each other biting limbs) which leads to bigger specimens. However, most captive bred axolotls are not genetically pure, and most have been historically hybridized with tiger salamanders.

Kaysie´s point is something that concerns me deeply. Captive axolotls are but a pale shadow of what a wild axolotl is. The hybridation was not monitored and it spread the genetic introgression into animals that weren´t golden albinos (this phase was the original result of the hybrid). As a result, there is no way to tell if any given captive axolotl is "contaminated" or not (unless a DNA comparisson was made). In addition to that, they have suffered a lot of generations of endogamy and artificial selection which has led to a domestication of the captive stock.
Since it´s hard to guarantee "purity" (i use the term very loosely) in any captive bloodline, i fear the only true axolotls are those left in the wild, and those are so screwed....

So i think that´s a pretty good reason to care about the wild population despite the huge numbers in captivity, because captive ones are simply no longer the same thing. If we loose the wild population, we loose Ambystoma mexicanum as a natural species.

That's such an interesting subject to be studying! It's a shame there's not more information about for you (this could be an excuse for a holiday in mexico >_>)

I believe they are studied at the university of kentucky..
Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center

And surely the Ambystoma Genetic Stock Center has a wild-type strain as well as all the variants. These wild-types would constitute the benchmark against which the variants are compared.

I don't think that's accurate. I have wildtype axolotls too, but I can't prove that they're genetically pure.

There's a huge difference between 'wildtype' axolotls, and truly pure wild axolotls.

I think I'd say that there are differences among three groups: pets with wild-type phenotype, wild-type lines used for biology, and wild animals.

Wild-type phenotype just means the axolotl looks like a wild type. Because almost all mutations are recessive, it's very hard to say what gene variants these guys may carry. You could breed two wild-type pets and get just about any colors in the offspring.

Based on my own experience, the biologists studying axolotls are very likely to have kept their wild types as pure as possible. I'm a plant molecular geneticist, and we are very careful about keeping our wild-type seed lines separate from all mutant lines. Of course, if a plant wouldn't grow in lab conditions, we don't have its descendants, and some wild traits can be lost through not being selected for. For instance, my department's colony of tobacco hornworms appear to have lost some of the adult moth's flower-seeking competence. These lines of experimental animals will breed true for color and other obvious traits, but might not compete well in the wild any more. This is what the AGSC would have.

Wild axolotls are different again. My guess is that they would have less color variation and more speed, since those are selected on immediately by predators, but more variation in traits like immune system genes, where having more different copies is very important in a disease-rich environment. They might be better hunters, too. Basically, captive-bred axolotls are couch potatoes. Wild ones struggle from the moment of hatching to eat and not be eaten, and part of what lets them succeed or fail at that is genetic. When you don't eat the weak ones, or you select ones that are happier living in tubs, you get a different breed even if you're trying to keep a pure line.

I was just looking for some academic journals on the OU website, most of them are very detailed studies which are probably not suitable for your needs.

but i did manage to find this

http://www.sciencedirect.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/science/article/pii/S0531556508002933

I was just reading a journal about the differences in lab axolotls vs wild ones in terms of genetic research test conditions, it basicaly says: genetic phenotypic variations change when axolotls are breed in captivity, Adaptaion accurs agaisnt a backdrop of complex ecological processes that can never be trully duplicated in the laboratory and it is this backdrop that the genetic architecture of phenotypic variation should be idealy tested. the captive axolotl will result in drifting genetic variations, however, the complete process of this mutation is currently still unclear.

But as Jinian said, it's likely to be the environment which keeps the axolotl in a constant struggle for survival, resulting in a smarter, faster and more active axolotl

This type of specimen is going to be far better to study than a lab bred axolotl who get mouth fed each day with fish pellets, i think test results could have far more accurate and less distortion of data

Snip...

gloriousspandex said:

Alright I'm doing a massive research paper/presentation on axolotls...

Click to expand...

I suspect Cady may have completed the high school project by now, 10 months on from his/her post.