Foot-long dwarf boa found in Ecuadorian Amazon
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Scientists have identified a tiny new species of dwarf boa living in the Ecuadorian Amazon that even a snake hater could love: These small reptiles are just a foot long.
Scientists have identified a tiny new species of dwarf boa living in the Ecuadorian Amazon that even a snake hater could love: These small reptiles are just a foot long.
Alex Bentley, research co-ordinator of the Sumak Kawsay In Situ field station in the eastern foothills of the Andes, stumbled across a small, curled up snake in a patch of cloud forest, an upland forest where clouds filter through the treetops.
He sent a photo of the snake to colleagues, including Omar Entiauspe-Neto, a graduate student at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and Butantan Institute in Brazil.
"We were immediately surprised, because it shouldn't be there," said Entiauspe-Neto, the corresponding author of the paper describing the species in the European Journal of Taxonomy.
Other dwarf boas have been identified elsewhere in South America and the West Indies, but none had ever been found in the region where Bentley spotted this one. The closest known match in Ecuador lives west of the Andes, and, according to Entiauspe-Neto, it looks "radically different" from the specimen in Bentley's photo.
While the snake didn't match any known species of dwarf boas, it had a lot in common with a specimen in the Ecuadorian Museum of Natural Sciences collected several years ago.
"We're usually afraid to describe new species based on only a single one, because there's a chance that there might be some sort of variation," Entiauspe-Neto said. "Once we had those two specimens, we were fairly sure they were a new species."
