San Juan, Puerto Rico (AP) -In the next two decades, no one has noticed the least known snakes in the world.
Some scientists were worried that Barbada Threadsnake may have disappeared, but one sunny morning, Connor Blades lifted the rock in a small forest in the eastern Caribbean and detained his breath.
“After a year of search, you start a bit pessimistic,” said the project officer of the Ministry of Environment of the Ministry of Environment.
The snake can fit comfortably on the coin, so for almost 20 years scientists could avoid. Too small to recognize with the naked eye, the blade put it in a small glass jar and added soil, substrate and leaf litter.
A few hours later, in front of the microscope at the Western Indian University, the blade looked at specimens. He came together in a Petri dish, making it almost impossible to recognize.
“It was a fight,” Baslade recalled, adding that he filmed a snake video and finally recognized it for a still image.
He had a light yellow back lines passing through his body and his eyes were on the side of his head.
“I tried to keep a smooth head,” Blades recalled, knowing that Barbados Threadsnake looks very similar to a Brahminy snake, best known as a snake of flower pots, which is slightly longer and has no back lines.
On Wednesday, Re: Wild Conservation Group, which cooperates with the Local Ministry of Environment, announced the discovery of Barbada Threadsnake.
“To rediscover one of our endemics at many levels is significant,” said Justin Springer, a Wild “Caribbean program officer who helped to rediscover snakes along with a blade. “It reminds us that there is still something important to us, which plays an important role in our ecosystem.”
Barbados Threadsnake since 1889 Only a few times have been observed. It was on the list of 4,800 plant, animal and fungal species, which is described as “lost in science”.
The snake is blind, in the cave land, eats termites and ants and lays one slender egg. He measures up to four inches (10 centimeters) completely.
“They are very secret,” Blades said. “You can do a survey for a few hours and even if they are there, you may not see them.”
But on March 20, at about 10:30 a.m., Blades and Springer surrounded Jack-in-the-Box wood in central barbades and began looking under the rocks, and the rest of the team began to measure a tree with a very limited barbad.
“That’s why the story is so exciting,” Springer said. “Everything happened at about the same time.”
S. Blair Hedges, a professor at the Temple University and the director of his Biology Center, was the first to identify Barbados Threadsnake. In the past, it was mistakenly linked to another species.
2008 The discovery of Hedges was published in the scientific journal, and the snake was baptized in the honor of his wife.
“I spent days looking for them,” Hedges recalled. “Based on my observations and hundreds of stones, the objects I transferred to finding this thing, I think this is a rare species.”
It was 2006. In June, and at that time, only three such specimens were known: two in the London Museum and a third in the museum collection in California, which was incorrectly identified as an antigva instead of Barbados, Hedges said.
The hedges said they did not realize that they had collected a new species until genetic analysis.
“Aha’s moment was in the laboratory,” he said, noting that the discovery found that Barbados Threadsnake was the smallest snake in the world.
Then the hedges flooded with letters, photos and email for many years. Letters from people thinking they found more “Barbada Threadsnakes”. Some photos were earthworms, he recalled.
“It was literally distraction,” he said.
Scientists hope the discovery means that Barbada Threadsnake can become the champion of wildlife habitats.
Numerous endemic species on a small island have disappeared, including Barbados Racer, The Barbada Skink and a certain type of cave shrimp.
“I hope they can have a little interested in protecting it,” Hedges said. “Barbados is a kind of unique in the Caribbean for a bad reason: it has the least original forest outside Haiti.”