World’s smallest snake discovered
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No, it’s not a worm. It’s what researchers from Penn State say is the world’s smallest snake.
Thin as a spaghetti noodle, Leptotyphlops cariae was discovered on the Caribbean island of Barbados by Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at the university. He reports his findings in today’s edition of Zootaxa.
The non-venomous snake is the smallest of more than 3,100 known snake species, Hedges says. ‘The smallest snakes are in the genus Leptotyphlops,’ he writes, ‘where six species have maximum lenths that are less than 105 mm.’ (That’s about 4 inches.)
Exceptionally small, or large, varieties of certain creatures are sometimes found on islands, and Hedges offers an explanation for this phenomenon: ‘The best explanation for the observation of body size extremes on islands is that colonziing species have adapted to open ecological niches that would otherwise be occupied on the mainland. Island colonists encounter novel environments and reduced interspecific competition, allowing species to evolve physical traits, including extremes in size, not normally seen on continents.’
Hedges also explains the cariae in Leptotyphlops cariae: ‘The species name is dedicated to my wife, Carla Ann Hass.’
-- Steve Padilla
