These 5 New Snake Species Suck Snails Out of Their Shells
The names of the snakes were auctioned off, and funds from the event will go toward preserving some of the species.
After a long night of searching for snakes in Ecuador, Alejandro Arteaga and his team of researchers got ready to retire. The evening’s excursion, in a swampy region of rain forest, hadn’t yielded any snakes from a species they were seeking.
But as rain poured down on the drive back to camp, Arteaga, a Ph.D. student at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History, decided to make one last stop.
“The road was so densely covered with vegetation that you could stretch your hand out of the car and grab the leaves, so I decided to turn on my headlamp and start scanning,” Arteaga recalls. “That's when I saw the first one."
Gliding over the rain-drenched vegetation, Arteaga spotted a small,
