Stargeek Continuum

A friend of mine was fond of saying "Life sucks and then you die." I've been feeling that way a lot lately, which is largely responsible for the erratic posting - but then again, there's always stuff like this to make life seem kinda cool. It's from the BBC, today:

The world's smallest snake, averaging just 10cm (4 inches) and as thin as a spaghetti noodle, has been discovered on the Caribbean island of Barbados.

The snake, found beneath a rock in a tiny fragment of threatened forest, is thought to be at the very limit of how small a snake can evolve to be.

It is so small it could curl up comfortably on a US quarter.

The snake has been labeled Leptotyphlops carlae by its discoverer, Dr. Blair Hedges - "leptotyphlops" meaning "small blind snake" (with over 80 species known previously); "carlae" in honor of his wife, Carla.

The reason for the conclusion about size limits is that while other, larger, snakes lay multiple eggs in a single clutch - as many as 100 - in this case the female lays just one massive egg at a time, producing a hatchling half the size of the its adult body weight. That may be the largest egg-to-body-mass ratio in nature: The San Diego Zoo says the kiwi lays the largest egg in proportion to its body size - in that case an egg that can be up to a quarter of the size of the adult. Proportionately, that's only about half the size of that produced by this snake. So it would not seem that the snake could produce a larger egg. But if it produced just two eggs at a time, the two would have to occupy the same total space as the one, which would mean each hatchling would be half the size, with the result that

[t]he hatchlings might then be too small to find anything small enough to eat.

But just as you're thinking cool and score another one for evolutionary adaptation, comes this:

Researchers believe that the snake - a type of thread snake - is so rare that it has survived un-noticed until now.

But with 95% of the island of Barbados now treeless, and the few fragments of forest seriously threatened, this new species of snake might become extinct only months after it was discovered.

And life re-emerges. Damn.

Footnote: A few years earlier, Hedges, together with his colleague Richard Thomas, found and described the world's smallest known lizard. It can rest on a dime.