IUCN<\/a>. One of the oldest known records of the species dates back to 1918, and it has only been rarely spotted since then, with a few documentations from 1966, 1997 and 2008, the Switzerland-based conservation organization said.<\/p>\n“Given the dense human population on Barbados, if the species was simply underrecorded it seems likely that local people would be aware of additional records,” the IUCN said on its website. “The lack of records suggests that this species is genuinely rare and restricted.”<\/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.<\/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
Hedges said that he didn’t realize he had collected a new species until he did a genetic analysis.<\/p>\n
“The aha moment was in the laboratory,” he said, noting that the discovery established the Barbados threadsnake as the world’s smallest-known snake.<\/p>\n
Hedges then became inundated for years with letters, photographs and emails from people thinking they had found more Barbados threadsnakes. Some of the pictures were of earthworms, he recalled.<\/p>\n
“It was literally years of distraction,” he said.<\/p>\n
Scientists hope the rediscovery means that the Barbados threadsnake could become a champion for the protection of wildlife habitat.<\/p>\n
A lot of endemic species on the tiny island have gone extinct, including the Barbados racer, the Barbados skink and a particular species of cave shrimp.<\/p>\n
“I hope they can get some interest in protecting it,” Hedges said. “Barbados is kind of unique in the Caribbean for a bad reason: it has the least amount of original forest, outside of Haiti.”<\/p>\n
\n More from CBS News\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For nearly two decades, no one had spotted the world’s smallest-known snake. Some scientists worried that maybe the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-19114","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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