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Updated: June 9, 2025
Experimentally, thyroid has been used to transform one into the other. Thus the occasional change of a Mexican axolotl, a purely aquatic newt, breathing through gills, into the amblystoma, a terrestrial salamander, with spotted skin, breathing by means of lungs, has long been known. Feeding the axolotl on thyroid gland produces the metamorphosis very quickly, even if the axolotl is kept in water.
The fact, however, that Axolotls require special treatment to induce metamorphosis seems to show that they have distinctly less congenital tendency to metamorphosis than larvae of the same species, Amblystoma tigrinum, in other parts of North America, and this difference must be attributed to the inherited effect of the conditions.
It is evident, therefore, that the Mexican Axolotls, although they have been perennibranchiate for a great number of generations, have not lost the hereditary tendency to the metamorphosis which changes the larvae of Amblystoma elsewhere into an air-breathing terrestrial animal.
In the reptile house at the London Zoological Gardens full-grown examples of the common black axolotl and the pretty white variety are exhibited. Some are nearly three inches long. Alongside are shown several examples of the amblystoma stage, produced in one of the laboratories of Oxford University and at the gardens by thyroid feeding.
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