The world’s smallest-known snake, the Barbados threadsnake, has been rediscovered after nearly two decades, sparking relief among scientists who feared it had become extinct.
Its elusive nature, attributed to its minuscule size – capable of fitting comfortably on a coin – had kept it hidden for almost 20 years.
The breakthrough came on a sunny morning when Connor Blades, a project officer with the Ministry of Environment in Barbados, lifted a rock in a tiny forest on the eastern Caribbean island.
“After a year of searching, you begin to get a little pessimistic,” Mr Blades admitted, describing the painstaking effort to locate the creature.
Due to its minute dimensions, the snake was too tiny to identify with the naked eye. Mr Blades carefully placed the specimen in a small glass jar with soil, substrate, and leaf litter.
Hours later, under a microscope at the University of the West Indies, the wriggling snake in a petri dish proved incredibly difficult to identify.
“It was a struggle,” Mr Blades recalled, explaining he eventually shot a video of the snake and identified it from a still image.
It had pale yellow dorsal lines running through its body, and its eyes were located on the side of its head.
“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.
On Wednesday, the Re:wild conservation group, which is collaborating with the local environment ministry, announced the rediscovery of the Barbados threadsnake.
“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.”
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.”
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).
“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.”
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.
“That’s why the story is so exciting,” Springer said. “It all happened around the same time.”
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.
In 2008, Hedges’ discovery was published in a scientific journal, with the snake baptized Tetracheilostoma carlae, in honor of his wife.
“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.”
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.
Hedges said that he didn’t realize 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 Barbados threadsnake as the world’s smallest-known snake.
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.
“It was literally years of distraction,” he said.
Scientists hope the rediscovery means that the Barbados threadsnake could become a champion for the protection of wildlife habitat.
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.
“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.”
