![\"Scientists](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/scientists-in-barbados.jpg\" "\\"This")
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This photo provided by Re:wild shows the Barbados threadsnake next to a ruler, in the Scotland District of St. Andrew, Barbados, Thursday, March 20, 2025. Credit: Connor Blades\/Re:wild via AP<\/p>\n
For nearly two decades, no one had spotted the world’s smallest-known snake. Some scientists worried that maybe the Barbados threadsnake had become extinct, but one sunny morning, Connor Blades lifted a rock in a tiny forest in the eastern Caribbean island and held his breath.<\/p>\n
“After a year of searching, you begin to get a little pessimistic,” said Blades, project officer with the Ministry of Environment in Barbados.<\/p>\n
The snake can fit comfortably on a coin, so it was able to elude scientists for almost 20 years. Too tiny to identify with the naked eye, Blades placed it in a small glass jar and added soil, substrate and leaf litter.<\/p>\n
Several hours later, in front of a microscope at the University of the West Indies, Blades looked at the specimen. It wriggled in the petri dish<\/a>, making it nearly impossible to identify.<\/p>\n “It was a struggle,” Blades recalled, adding that he shot a video of the snake and finally identified it thanks to a still image.<\/p>\n It had pale yellow dorsal lines running through its body, and its eyes were located on the side of its head.<\/p>\n “I tried to keep a level head,” Blades recalled, knowing that the Barbados threadsnake looks very much like a Brahminy blind snake, best known as the flower pot snake, which is a bit longer and has no dorsal lines.<\/p>\n On Wednesday, the Re:wild conservation group, which is collaborating with the local environment ministry, announced the rediscovery of the Barbados threadsnake.<\/p>\n “Rediscovering one of our endemics on many levels is significant,” said Justin Springer, Caribbean program officer for Re:wild who helped rediscover the snake along with Blades. “It reminds us that we still have something important left that plays an important role in our ecosystem.”<\/p>\n The Barbados threadsnake has only been seen a handful of times since 1889. It was on a list of 4,800 plant, animal and fungi species that Re:wild described as “lost to science.”<\/p>\n The snake is blind, burrows in the ground, eats termites and ants and lays one single, slender egg. Fully grown, it measures up to four inches (10 centimeters).<\/p>\n “They’re very cryptic,” Blades said. “You can do a survey for a number of hours, and even if they are there, you may actually not see them.”<\/p>\n But on March 20 at around 10:30 a.m., Blades and Springer surrounded a jack-in-the-box tree in central Barbados and started looking under rocks while the rest of the team began measuring the tree, whose distribution is very limited in Barbados.<\/p>\n “That’s why the story is so exciting,” Springer said. “It all happened around the same time.”<\/p>\n S. Blair Hedges, a professor at Temple University and director of its center for biology, was the first to identify the Barbados threadsnake. Previously, it was mistakenly lumped in with another species.<\/p>\n In 2008, Hedges’ discovery was published in a scientific journal, with the snake baptized Tetracheilostoma carlae, in honor of his wife.<\/p>\n “I spent days searching for them,” Hedges recalled. “Based on my observations and the hundreds of rocks, objects that I turned over looking for this thing without success, I do think it is a rare species.”<\/p>\n That was June 2006, and there were only three other such specimens known at the time: two at a London museum and a third at a museum collection in California that was wrongly identified as being from Antigua instead of Barbados, Hedges said.<\/p>\n \n Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. Hedges said that he didn’t realize he had collected a new species until he did a genetic analysis.<\/p>\n
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