San Juan, Puerto Rico (AP)-For nearly two decades, no one had noticed the smallest famous snake in the world.
Some scientists were worried that maybe the Barbad thread of the nipples had disappeared, but one sunny morning, Connor Blades lifted a rock in a tiny forest on the Eastern Caribbean Island and had a breath.
“After a year of search, you are starting to receive a little pessimistic,” says Blades, a project officer from the Barbados Ministry of Environment.
The snake can fit comfortably on a coin, so it has managed to avoid scientists for almost 20 years. Too tiny to identify with the naked eye, the blades place it in a small glass jar and add soil, substrate and leaves.
A few hours later, in front of a microscope at the University of Western India, Blades looked at the copy. He twisted on the Petri Plate, which makes it almost impossible to identify.
“It was a struggle,” Blades recalls, adding that he filmed a video of the snake and finally identified it thanks to a stationary image.
There were pale yellow dorsal lines passing through his body, his eyes located on the side of his head.
“I tried to maintain the level of level,” Blades recalled, knowing that the Barbadosal cavalry looks a lot like a blind snake, most known as the snake of the flower pot, which is a little longer and no dorsal lines.
On Wednesday, the Re: Wild Conservation group, which collaborates with the local Ministry of Environment, announced a rediscovery of Barbados Threadsnake.
“The rediscovery of one of our endemics on many levels is significant,” says Justin Springer, an employee of the Caribbean program for Re: Wild, who helped to rediscover the snake with Blades. “It reminds us that we still have something important that plays an important role in our ecosystem.”
Barbados Threadsnake has only been seen a handful of times since 1889. It is a list of 4800 species of plants, animals and fungi that are wild, described as “lost by science”.
The snake is blind, crashes into the ground, eats termites and ants, and lays one, slender egg. Completely grown, it measures up to four inches (10 centimeters).
“They are very encrypted,” Blades said. “You can do a study for a few hours and even if they are there, you may not see them.”
But on March 20, around 10:30 am, Blades and Springer surrounded a Jack tree in the box in Central Barbados and began to look under rocks, while the rest of the team began to measure the tree, which was very limited in Barbados.
“That’s why the story is so exciting,” Springer said. “Everything happened at about the same time.”
S. Blair Hedges, a professor at Temple University and director of his biology center, was the first to identify Barbados Threadsnake. Previously, he was wrong with another species.
In 2008, the discovery of Hedges was published in a scientific magazine, with the snake baptizing tetrachylostoma Carla, in honor of his wife.
“I spent days searching for them,” Hedges recalled. “Based on my observations and the hundreds of rocks, objects that I overturned, looking for this thing without success, I think it is a rare species.”
It was June 2006 and there were only three other similar specimens known at the time: two at the London Museum and a third in a museum collection in California, which were mistakenly identified as Antiga instead of Barbados, Hedges said.
Hedges said he did not realize that he had collected a new species until he did a genetic analysis.
“Aha’s moment was in the laboratory,” he said, noting that the discovery created Barbados’s thread as the smallest known snake in the world.
Hedges then flooded for years with letters, photos and emails from people who think they have found more barbad snakes. Some of the photos were of earthworms, he recalled.
“It was literally years of distraction,” he said.
Scientists hope that rediscovery means that Barbados’s thread can become a champion to protect the habitat of the wild.
Many endemic species of the tiny island have disappeared, including the Barbados competitor, the Barbados skin and a certain type of cave shrimp.
“I hope they can show some interest in protecting it,” Hedges said. “Barbados is something unique in the Caribbean for a bad reason: there is a small amount of original forest, outside Haiti.”