eastern Caribbean island<\/a> and held his breath.<\/p>\n\u201cAfter a year of searching, you begin to get a little pessimistic,\u201d 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, making it nearly impossible to identify.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a struggle,\u201d 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
\u201cI tried to keep a level head,\u201d 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
\u201cRediscovering one of our endemics on many levels is significant,\u201d said Justin Springer, Caribbean program officer for Re:wild who helped rediscover the snake along with Blades. \u201cIt reminds us that we still have something important left that plays an important role in our ecosystem.\u201d<\/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 \u201clost to science.\u201d<\/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
\u201cThey\u2019re very cryptic,\u201d Blades said. \u201cYou can do a survey for a number of hours, and even if they are there, you may actually not see them.\u201d<\/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
\u201cThat\u2019s why the story is so exciting,\u201d Springer said. \u201cIt all happened around the same time.\u201d<\/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\u2019 discovery was published in a scientific journal, with the snake baptized Tetracheilostoma carlae, in honor of his wife.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spent days searching for them,\u201d Hedges recalled. \u201cBased 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.\u201d<\/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\u2019t realize he had collected a new species until he did a genetic analysis.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe aha moment was in the laboratory,\u201d he said, noting that the discovery established the Barbados threadsnake as the world\u2019s 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
\u201cIt was literally years of distraction,\u201d 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
\u201cI hope they can get some interest in protecting it,\u201d Hedges said. \u201cBarbados is kind of unique in the Caribbean for a bad reason: it has the least amount of original forest, outside of Haiti<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — For nearly two decades, no one had spotted the world\u2019s smallest-known snake. Some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31870,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[26720,1147,966,1685,793,79,17530,201,965],"class_list":{"0":"post-31869","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-26720","9":"tag-animals","10":"tag-article","11":"tag-climate-and-environment","12":"tag-general-news","13":"tag-science","14":"tag-snakes","15":"tag-wildlife","16":"tag-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31869\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}