Even though most people would never call a snake “cute,” a new species of dwarf boa could qualify. Scientists discovered the snake, which measures under a foot long, in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
A paper describing the snake’s rare finding, written partly by Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and Butantan Institute grad student Omar Entiauspe-Neto, was published this month in the European Journal of Taxonomy.
Entiauspe-Neto told CNN that he was made aware of the snake by Alex Bentley, who works as a research coordinator of the Sumak Kawsay In Situ field station in the eastern foothills of the Andes. While Bentley found the snake curled up in a patch of cloud forest, Entiauspe-Neto says that it “shouldn’t” have been there.
“We were immediately surprised,” Entiauspe-Neto said, noting that dwarf boas had previously never been found in the area.
Dwarf boas are known to be in South America and the West Indies, but the closest known match to the newly discovered snake lives west of the Andes and looks “radically different,” Entiauspe-Neto said.
While a normal boa constrictor can measure as long as 18 feet and weigh around 60 pounds, the dwarf boa is drastically smaller. The snake measures up to 20 centimeters long, or 7.8 inches, is colored very similar to boa constrictors and has been named Tropidophis cacuangoae.
While bigger boa constrictors eat large animals like wild pigs, often squeezing them to death, dwarf boas like Tropidophis cacuangoae mainly consume small lizards.
Another difference between the two is how they defend themselves. While the smaller snake doesn’t have the strength to squeeze its prey or enemies, it instead curls into a ball and bleeds out of its eyes to thwart would-be-attackers, as Entiauspe-Neto says that most animals go after living prey.
Because of this, he says a “predator is very likely to think that the snake might be either sick or dying, so, therefore, it will not feed on it.”
According to Mario Yanez from the National Biodiversity Institute, the snakes are often referred to as a “relic of time. They are animals so old that finding or bumping into one of them is a privilege,” AFP reported.
Tropidophis cacuangoae has not matched any known living species of dwarf boas. However, scientists shared in their paper several commonalities between it and another specimen in the Ecuadorian Museum of Natural Sciences, which was 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 told CNN. “Once we had those two specimens, we were fairly sure they were a new species.”
According to CNN, scientists compared the physical characteristics of the species, as well as genetic sequences, confirming that what they had found was a new animal.
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