by San Juan, Puerto Rico (AP) Fast for two decades, nobody had discovered the smallest acquaintance in the world for two decades.
Some scientists feared that the Barbados Fadensnake might have died out, but on a sunny morning Connor Blades raised a rock in a tiny forest in the eastern Caribbean island and held her breath.
“After a year of the search, you will be a little pessimistic,” said Blades, Project Officer of the Ministry of Environment in Barbados.
The snake can fit comfortably in a coin so that it was able to avoid scientists for almost 20 years. Too tiny to identify with the naked eye, the blades placed it in a small glass and soil, substrate and leaf loath.
A few hours later, in front of a microscope at the University of the West Indies, the leaves viewed the copy. It fidgeted in the Petri dish and made it almost impossible to identify.
“It was a fight,” Blades recalled, adding that he turned a video of the snake and finally identified thanks to a still image.
It had light yellow dorsal lines that ran through his body, and his eyes were on the side of his head.
“I tried to keep a flat head,” the Blades recalled and knew that the Barbados Fadensnake looks a Brahmininy blind snake that is best known as a flower pot snake that is a bit longer and has no dorsal lines.
On Wednesday, the RE: Wild Conservation Group, which is working with the local Ministry of the Environment, announced the rediscovery of the Barbado -Threadsnake.
“It is important to rediscover one of our endemies on many levels,” said Justin Springer, Caribbean program officer at Re: Wild, who helped with the blades to rediscover the snake. “It reminds us that we still have something important that plays an important role in our ecosystem.”
The Barbados Fadensnake has only been seen a few times since 1889. It was on a list of 4,800 types of plant, animal and mushrooms that described wildly as “lost against science”.
The snake is blind, dig in the ground, eats termites and ants and lays a single, slim egg. It is balanced up to four inches (10 centimeters).
“They are very cryptic,” said Blades. “You can carry out a survey for a few hours, and even if you are there, you may not see it.”
But on March 20 at 10:30 a.m. blades and Springer surrounded a jack-in-the-box tree in central Barbados and looked under rocks, while the rest of the team measures the tree, the distribution of which is very limited in Barbados.
“That’s why the story is so exciting,” said Springer. “Everything happened about the same time.”
S. Blair Hedges, professor at Temple University and director of the Center for Biology, was the first to identify the Barbados threads nake. Before that, it was wrongly set up with a different kind.
In 2008 Hedges’ discovery was published in a scientific magazine with the snake Tetracheilostoma Carlae in honor of his wife.
“I spent days looking for them,” recalled Hedges. “Based on my observations and the hundreds of rocks, objects that I looked for without success for this thing, I think it is a rare way.”
That was June 2006, and at that time there were only three more such copies: two in a London museum and a third in a museum collection in California, which was incorrectly identified as from Antigua instead of Barbados, said Hedges.
Hedges said he didn’t know that he had collected a new way until he carried out a genetic analysis.
“The eye-catcher was in the laboratory,” he said, noticing that the discovery found the Barbados thread nake as the smallest acquaintance in the world.
Hedges was then flooded with letters, photos and e -mails by people for years that they had found more Barbados threads. Some of the pictures were earthworms, he recalled.
“It was literally a distraction,” he said.
Scientists hope that rediscovery means that the Barbados Fadensnake could become a champion to protect the habitat of wild animals.
Many endemic species on the tiny island have died out, including the Barbados Racer, the Barbados Skink and a certain type of cave shrimp.
“I hope you can have a certain interest in protecting it,” said Hedges. “Barbados is unique for a bad reason in the Caribbean: it has the slightest amount of original forest outside of Haiti.”
