Slash, also known as Saul Hudson, is famous worldwide as the guitarist for Guns N’ Roses. But music is only part of his story. He has also been fascinated by reptiles for most of his life and has long supported zoos, museums, and natural history.
Now that passion has earned him an unusual scientific honor. Researchers have named a newly identified snake species from New Guinea Lielaphis slashi, or Slash’s groundsnake.
“As a long time herpephile, I am extremely honored and humbled to have Lielaphis slashi from New Guinea named after me. It is really exciting, I never would have imagined this moment would arrive,” says Slash.
A Childhood Connection to Slash
For Sara Ruane, the Field Museum’s Associate Curator of Herpetology and senior author of a paper in Zootaxa describing the species, the name also has a personal connection.
“Guns N’ Roses has been one of my favorite bands since I was in first grade, and by fifth grade, I had already told my teacher that I wanted to be a herpetologist — a scientist who studies reptiles — when I grew up,” says Sara Ruane, the Field Museum’s Associate Curator of Herpetology and senior author of a paper in Zootaxa describing the new species. “So when I was twelve years old and got my copy of Reptiles Magazine in the mail and it had a picture of Slash holding his pet reticulated python on the cover, I thought, ‘This guy is so cool.'”
Years later, after Ruane became a scientist who sometimes has the opportunity to assign official names to newly recognized reptile species, she returned to that old magazine interview.
“I reread his interview, and he talked about how much he loves museums and zoos and natural history, and about how when he was a kid, he’d go outside and look for snakes — it was all stuff that I really related to, and it made me think that he’d be a great person to name a new species after,” says Ruane.
Her opportunity eventually came in the form of a reddish-brown snake measuring 28 inches long that had been collected in the forests of New Guinea.
A Mysterious Snake From New Guinea
New Guinea is the world’s second-largest island, behind Greenland. Located just north of Australia, the island is divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Its tropical forests support enormous biological diversity, much of which remains poorly documented by scientists.
During fieldwork one night in 2006, Chris Austin, a professor and curator of herpetology at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, encountered a snake in New Guinea that he did not recognize.
“These New Guinea groundsnakes are nocturnal, so the best way to find them is at night. They are typically found just after sunset at the base of large trees where they are looking for something to eat,” says Austin, a co-author of the paper describing the new species. “When working at night in New Guinea you need to be very careful as there are several highly venomous species that look very similar to the non-venomous groundsnakes.”
After completing her doctorate, Ruane worked with Austin at LSU in 2016. The two began collaborating to better understand New Guinea’s poorly studied snakes, and they have continued working together on the group ever since.
Genetics Reveal a New Species
At first glance, the snake did not obviously appear to represent a species new to science. Laboratory work, however, revealed important differences.
“Using multiple cutting-edge genetic analyses, we found that L. slashi is genetically distinct from other similar snakes in the same genus,” says Tianqi Huang, the study’s first author and a post-doctoral researcher at the Field Museum with Ruane. “The combination of physical characteristics, like differences in numbers of scales when compared with other species, and the genetic evidence is what led us to realize that it is an entirely new species. We also used ecological modeling to show that L. slashi‘s preferred habitat is different from similar snakes.”
The researchers combined genetic evidence with physical traits, including differences in scale counts, to distinguish L. slashi from related snakes. Ecological modeling also indicated that the new species favors a different type of habitat than similar members of the genus.
What Slash’s Groundsnake Eats
Scientists still know relatively little about the behavior and ecology of Slash’s groundsnake.
“It’s incredibly hard to observe snakes in the wild before they slither away, so our knowledge about L. slashi is limited,” says Ruane.
Its anatomy does provide some hints about how it may live and feed.
“Snakes in this genus often have large teeth in the back of their mouths, which New Guinea groundsnakes may use to grab on to and eat small, slippery-scaled lizards and the eggs of other reptiles; this snake isn’t grasping and squeezing its prey like a boa constrictor,” says Ruane.
Although Guns N’ Roses has been called the “most dangerous band in the world,” its reptilian namesake is not dangerous to people. L. slashi does not produce venom capable of seriously harming a human.
Threats to New Guinea’s Forests
Slash’s groundsnake may pose little danger to humans, but human activity could threaten the species and many other animals living in New Guinea’s forests.
“The habitats that Slash’s groundsnake is from are under threat from industries like coffee farming and mining,” says Ruane. “That’s part of why describing the species that live there is important. Every species should be recognized in order for us to better understand how ecosystems work, how everything fits into the environment. We can’t conserve animals or other living things that we don’t know about.”
By formally identifying species such as L. slashi, scientists can build a clearer picture of New Guinea’s biodiversity and better understand which organisms may be at risk as their habitats change.
This study was contributed to by Tianqi Huang (Field Museum and Rutgers University), Chris Austin (Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science), Justin Bernstein (Slippery Rock University and the American Museum of Natural History), Bulisa Iova (Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery), Jackson Roberts (Virginia Museum of Natural History), Jeffrey Frederick (University of Kentucky), and Sara Ruane (Field Museum).
