The smallest known snake in the world found under barbados rocks after almost 20 years

For almost two decades, no one had spotted the smallest smallest snake in the world.

Some scientists feared that perhaps the barbadic thread had extinguished, but a sunny morning, Connor Blades raised a rock in a small forest on the East Caribbean island and has retained its breath.

“After a year of research, you are starting to become a little pessimistic,” said Blades, project manager at the Barbados Ministry.

The snake can adapt comfortably on a room, so it has been able to escape scientists for almost 20 years.

Scientifically named Tetracheilostoma Carlae, the little creature is listed as critical in danger Endangered species During his last assessment in 2015.

Too tiny to identify with the naked eye, the blades placed it in a small glass jar and added soil, substrate and leaf litter.

Several hours later, in front of a microscope at the University of the Antilles, Blades watched the sample. He was torlled in the Petri box, which makes identification almost impossible.

“It was a struggle,” recalls Blades, adding that he had shot a video of the snake and finally identified it thanks to a motionless image.

He had pale yellow dorsal lines that crossed his body and his eyes were located on the side of his head.

“I tried to keep a level of level,” recalls Blades, knowing that the barbado thread is very similar to a blind snake Brahmane, better known as Snake Flower Pot, which is a little longer and has no back lines.

On Wednesday, the RE: Wild Conservation Group, which collaborates with the local ministry of the environment, announced the rediscovery of the barbades’ threadsnake.

“The rediscovery of one of our endemics on several levels is important,” said Justin Springer, head of the Caribbean program for Re: Wild, who helped rediscover the snake with the blades. “It reminds us that we still have something important that plays an important role in our ecosystem.”

The barbade thread has been seen only a handful of times since 1889. It is on a list of 4,800 species of plants, animals and mushrooms that are: Sauvage described as “lost against science”.

There is no information on its population and the most recent record in the serpent was a photograph of 2005 near the city of Hillaby in the parish of St. Thomas, according to the IUCN. One of the oldest known recordings of the species dates back to 1918, and it has only rarely been spotted since then, with some documentation from 1966, 1997 and 2008, said the conservation organization based in Switzerland.

“Given the dense human population at Barbados, if the species was simply under-registered, it seems likely that the local population is aware of the additional files,” said the IUCN on its website. “The lack of files suggest that this species is really rare and limited.”

The snake is blind, searches in the ground, eats termites and ants and lays a single thin egg. Completely cultivated, it measures up to four inches.

“They are very cryptic,” said Blades. “You can do an investigation for a number of 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 in the-Box tree in the center of the barbados and started looking under rocks while the rest of the team began to measure the tree, whose distribution is very limited to barbados.

“This is why the story is so exciting,” said Springer. “Everything happened at the same time at the same time.”

S. Blair Hedges, professor at Temple University and director of his Center for Biology, was the first to identify the Barbadian thread. Previously, it had been wrongly grouped with another species.

In 2008, the discovery of Hedges was published in a scientific review, with the serpent called Tetracheilostoma Carle, in honor of his wife.

“I spent days looking for them,” recalls Hedges. “Based on my observations and hundreds of rocks, objects that I have returned to find this thing without success, I think it is a rare species.”

It was in June 2006, and there were only three other specimens of this type known at the time: two in a museum in London and a third in a collection of museums in California which was wrongly identified as antigua instead of Barbados, said Hedges.

Hedges said he had not realized that he had collected a new species until he did a genetic analysis.

“The Aha moment was in the laboratory,” he said, noting that the discovery established the thread of the barbados as the smallest the smallest snake in the world.

The hedges were then flooded for years with letters, photographs and e-mails of people thinking that they have found more barbade threadsnakes. Some images were earthworms, he recalls.

“It was literally years of distraction,” he said.

Scientists hope that rediscovery means that the barbados thread could become a champion in the protection of wildlife habitat.

Many endemic species on the small island have disappeared, notably the barbado runner, the barbado sawn and a particular species of cave shrimp.

“I hope they may have some interest in protecting it,” said Hedges. “Barbados is a bit unique in the Caribbean for a bad reason: it has the least original forest, outside of Haiti.”