World's Smallest Known Snake Rediscovered

For nearly two decades, no one had spotted the world's smallest known snake. Some scientists worried that maybe the Barbados threadsnake had become extinct, but one sunny morning, Connor Blades lifted a rock in a tiny forest in the eastern Caribbean island and held his breath. "After a year of searching, you begin to get a little pessimistic," says Blades, project officer with the Ministry of Environment in Barbados.

• The snake can fit comfortably on a coin, so it was long able to elude scientists. Too tiny to identify with the naked eye, 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 West Indies, Blades looked at the specimen. It wriggled in the petri dish, making it nearly impossible to identify. "It was a struggle," Blades says, adding that he shot a video of the snake and finally identified it thanks to 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 says, 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, confirmed the rediscovery of the Barbados threadsnake.

• "Rediscovering one of our endemics on many levels is significant," says 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. "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."
• Scientists hope the rediscovery means that the Barbados threadsnake could become a champion for the protection of wildlife habitat on the tiny island, where many other endemic species, including the Barbados skink, have gone extinct.