She loved Guns N' Roses since first grade, became a snake scientist — and named her new species after Slash
Lielaphis slashi, a new nonvenomous groundsnake species from New Guinea, has been named after Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash by Field Museum herpetologist Sara Ruane. Details on the discovery and the Zootaxa study.
Welcome to the jungle, Lielaphis slashi. You're 28 inches long, you eat lizards, and you have a top hat in spirit.
Every so often science produces a headline so perfectly shaped that you assume it's a bit. It is not a bit. Per Popular Science, a newly described snake from New Guinea is now officially Lielaphis slashi, "Slash's groundsnake," and the senior author of the paper is a woman whose entire life has apparently been building to this moment since she was six.
The origin story, which is better than most superhero movies
Meet Sara Ruane, Associate Curator of Herpetology at the Field Museum in Chicago. According to the Field Museum's announcement, Guns N' Roses has been one of her favorite bands since first grade. By fifth grade she'd informed her teacher she was going to be a herpetologist. And at twelve, her copy of Reptiles Magazine arrived with Slash on the cover holding his pet reticulated python, and she thought, essentially, that this was the coolest guy alive.
So to recap, a child with two interests (snakes, Slash) grew up, got a doctorate, went to New Guinea, found a snake, and named it after Slash. This is the most efficient use of a personality I have ever encountered. There is a photo of her and Slash in a lab, holding that exact magazine. I've looked at it eleven times.
Most of us have a childhood poster on the wall. Sara Ruane has a childhood poster in the Linnaean taxonomy.
About the snake, since it did the work
Some facts, courtesy of PopSci and the study in Zootaxa:
- It's 28 inches long, reddish-brown, and nonvenomous. You can relax.
- It was first spotted in 2006 by Chris Austin, an LSU herpetologist, during nighttime field work. The groundsnakes are nocturnal and hang out at the base of big trees after sunset looking for dinner.
- The catch: per Austin, New Guinea is also home to several highly venomous snakes that look very similar to these harmless ones. So "finding a cute groundsnake at night" involves a level of confidence I do not possess.
- It didn't look like a new species. The lab did that. Co-author Tianqi Huang ran genetic analyses showing it's distinct from its cousins in the genus, backed by scale counts and ecological modeling showing it prefers a different habitat.
- It has large teeth at the back of its mouth, which, per Ruane, are probably for grabbing small slippery lizards and reptile eggs. Not a squeezer. A grabber.
Slash, for the record, is thrilled
Slash emailed PopSci and described himself as a "long time herpephile" who is honored and humbled by the whole thing, and said he never imagined this moment would arrive. Ruane, meanwhile, went back and reread that old interview and found a man who loves museums, zoos, and natural history, and who went looking for snakes in his backyard as a kid, which is to say, a man who was going to get a snake eventually, one way or another.
He's in good company. Recent years have produced a snake named for Harrison Ford, a wolf snake named for Steve Irwin, and a moth named for Pope Leo. The Pope got a moth. Slash got a snake. The universe has a sense of humor and it is correct.
There is a version of this story where the snake is named after a donor. Instead it's named after a guy who once owned enough reptiles to require a dedicated room. Science, occasionally, gets it right.
The serious bit, briefly, because Ruane made it: New Guinea's forests are under pressure from farming and mining, and, as she put it, nobody can conserve a species they don't know exists. So describing the snake is the first step. Naming it after Slash is just the part that makes people read the paper.
