World

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

Some scientists were concerned that perhaps the snake of Barbados threads would have extinguished, but a sunny morning, Connor Blades raised a rock in a small forest on the Eastern Caribbean island and contained the breath.

“After a year of search, you start getting some pessimistic,” said Blades, project officer of the Ministry of Environment in Barbados.

The snake can fit comfortably in a currency, so he could avoid scientists for almost 20 years.

Scientifically called tetracheilostoma Carlae, the small creature appears as critical danger in the International Union for the Conservation of the Red List of Nature of Nature Threatened species when it was last evaluated in 2015.

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

Several hours later, in front of a microscope at the University of the Western Indies, Blades looked at the specimen. He twisted on the Petri plate, which makes it almost impossible to identify.

“It was a fight,” Blades recalled, added that he filmed a video of the snake and finally identified him thanks to a fixed image.

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

“I tried to maintain a level head,” Blades recalled, knowing that the snake of Barbados threads looks a lot like a blind snake Brahminy, better known as the snake of the flower pot, which is a little longer and does not have dorsal lines.

On Wednesday, the Re: Wild conservation group, which is collaborating with the local Ministry of Environment, announced the rediscovery of Barbados Threadsnake.

“Rediscovering one of our endemic at many levels is significant,” said Justin Springer, a Caribbean programs officer for Re: Wild who helped rediscover the snake along with the blades. “It reminds us that we still have something important that plays an important role in our ecosystem.”

The Barbados thread snake has only been seen a handful of times since 1889. It was on a list of 4,800 species of plants, animals and fungi that are described as “lost for science.”

There is no information about its population and the most recent registration of the snake was a photograph of 2005 from close to the city of Hillaaby in the parish of St. Thomas, according to the IUCN. One of the oldest known records of the species dates back to 1918, and has rarely been seen since then, with some documents from 1966, 1997 and 2008, said the conservation organization based in Switzerland.

“Given the dense human population in Barbados, if the species simply underlines, it seems likely that local people be aware of additional records,” said the UICN on its website. “The lack of records suggests that this species is really rare and restricted.”

The snake is blind, burrows on the floor, eat termites and ants and puts a single thin egg. Fully cultivated, measures up to four inches.

“They are very cryptic,” Blades said. “You can do a survey for several 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 Barbados and began to look under the rocks, while the rest of the team began to measure the tree, whose distribution is very limited in Barbados.

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

S. Blair Hedges, professor at the University of Temple and director of his Biology Center, was the first to identify the snake of Barbados wires. Previously, it accumulated erroneously with another species.

In 2008, the discovery of Hedges was published in a scientific journal, with the tetracheilostoma snake Carlae, in honor of his wife.

“I spent days looking for them,” Hedges recalled. “According to my observations and the hundreds of rocks, objects that I delivered looking for this without success, I think it is a rare species.”

That was in June 2006, and there were only three other specimens of this type known at that time: two in a London Museum and a third in a collection of museums in California that was wrongly identified as an old instead of Barbados, Hedges said.

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

“AHA’s moment was in the laboratory,” he said, and pointed out that the discovery established the snake threads of Barbados as the smallest snake in the world.

Then, Hedges flooded for years with letters, photographs and emails of people who thought they had found more snakes of barbados wires. Some of the images were earth worms, he recalled.

“They were literally years of distraction,” he said.

Scientists expect rediscovery to mean that Barbados thread snake could become a champion for wildlife habitat protection.

Many endemic species on the small island have been extinguished, including the Racero Barbados, Barbados Skink and a particular species of Cuevas shrimp.

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