A snake the size of a gummy worm has made a surprise comeback in the forests of Barbados, nearly two decades after it was thought to be completely off the map. The Barbados threadsnake (Tetracheilostoma carlae) is officially the smallest snake on Earth, and it was just rediscovered during an ecological survey by the country’s Ministry of Environment and conservation group Re:wild.
This thing is tiny—three to four inches long when fully grown, thinner than a shoelace, and light enough to balance on a quarter. It also kind of looks like a stretched-out earthworm, which is exactly what it was hiding beside when researchers spotted it under a rock earlier this year.
“Barbados threadsnakes are blind snakes, so they’re very cryptic,” said Connor Blades, a project officer with the Ministry of Environment, in a press release. “They’re quite rare also, it seems. There have only been a handful of confirmed sightings since 1889.”
The rediscovery wasn’t a casual fluke. Blades and Re:wild’s Justin Springer spent over a year flipping rocks and scanning the forest floor before finding the elusive reptile. When it finally turned up, Springer said, “You can’t believe it. That’s how I felt. You don’t want to get your hopes up too high.”
This is the World’s Smallest Snake
The snake was briefly taken to the University of the West Indies for confirmation—it looks a lot like the invasive Brahminy blind snake, so the team needed to verify it under a microscope before releasing it back into the wild.
Despite the excitement, this snake’s future is fragile. Only two percent of Barbados’ original forest remains intact. Most of it was cleared over the last 400 years for agriculture, and the threadsnake’s ultra-specific habitat needs aren’t easy to recreate. It also doesn’t help that female threadsnakes lay only one egg at a time, while their invasive lookalikes can reproduce solo and in bulk.
“The threadsnake’s rediscovery is also a call to all of us as Barbadians that forests in Barbados are very special and need protection,” Springer said. “Not just for the threadsnake, but for other species as well. For plants, animals, and our heritage.”
The world’s tiniest snake has officially re-entered the chat. Blink and you’ll miss it—but its return means everything for conservation.
The post World’s Smallest Snake Found Again After Disappearing for Decades appeared first on VICE.
