Ikal.

This framed poster of Ikal is an art print with frame and glass already assembled: it arrives ready to hang, no trip to a framing shop needed. The portrait shows Ikal, the axolotl from Xochimilco, on the paper chosen for the Animal Kinhood series. The frame is made to order in the available color — black or natural — and the glass protects the print from dust and surface scratches.

What you hang at home when you buy this is, literally, a Critically Endangered species according to the IUCN Red List. The Mexican axolotl (*Ambystoma mexicanum*) lost 99% of its wild population between 1998 and 2014, and its only natural habitat in the world is in the canals and chinampas of Xochimilco, in southern Mexico City. That's it. A single borough. A single aquatic ecosystem. That fact turns the portrait into something closer to a natural history museum specimen card than neutral living-room decoration.

In 2021, Banco de México issued the new Family G of the 50-peso note. It replaced the historic portrait of José María Morelos and put in its place, on the front, an engraving of Tenochtitlan, and on the back, a chinampa ecosystem with the axolotl swimming among roots and an ahuejote heron flying over the canal grid. From that moment on, anyone who lives in Mexico or has passed through has had, in their wallet several times a year, a small portrait of the same animal that appears in this poster.

The irony holds without underlining: the species that travels through the pockets of an entire country every day is on the verge of disappearing from the planet. The 50-peso note you pay for a coffee in La Condesa, or for some tamales from San Gregorio Atlapulco, carries the face of an animal that lives only in the chinampas thirty kilometers from that same café, and that mass tourism, urbanization, and the introduction of invasive carp and tilapia are pushing toward extinction. The bill doesn't save it. Hanging this framed poster at home brings the image to the format where you actually look at it calmly: the wall.