SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — A small snake has sparked a big debate in Barbados.
Residents of the wealthy Caribbean nation have been heating up blogs and clogging radio airwaves to vent their anger at a U.S. scientist who last week announced his “discovery” of the world’s smallest snake. He named it Leptotyphlops carlae, after his wife Carla.
“If he needs to blow his own trumpet . . . well, fine,” said 43-year-old Barbadian Charles Atkins. “But my mother, who was a simple housewife, she showed me the snake when I was a child.”
Penn State University evolutionary biologist S. Blair Hedges recently became the first to describe the snake — which is so small it can curl up on a U.S. quarter — when he published his observations and genetic test results in the journal Zootaxa. Full-grown adults typically are less than 4 inches long.
Hedges told The Associated Press on Friday that he understands Barbadians’ anger, but under established scientific practice, the first person to do a full description of a species is said to have discovered it and gives it a scientific name.
Damon Corrie, president of the Caribbean Herpetological Society, acknowledged that Hedges is the first to scientifically examine and describe the snake, but the so-called discovery makes locals seem ignorant.
