A decade from specimen to species name: what Slash's groundsnake says about New Guinea's backlog

Every further name in this genus will cost roughly what this one cost. Genetic work needs tissue in usable condition, and niche modeling needs georeferenced records, and both come from the same place: someone crouched at the base of a large tree after sunset, in the window when these snakes are out looking for food ^[8]. Chris Austin, who curates herpetology at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, says the same forests at the same hour hold several highly venomous species that closely resemble the harmless groundsnakes ^[7][9]. Night collecting by people who can tell those apart in a headlamp beam is not an input you can scale up on demand.

The tempo shows in the dates. Austin met the animal in 2006 ^[7]. Ruane finished her doctorate and went to work with him at LSU in 2016, and the two have collaborated on New Guinea's poorly known snakes since ^[13]. At least ten years therefore separate the encounter from the paper that gave the snake a name ^[19]. Coffee farming and mining, which Ruane names as the pressures on this snake's habitat, do not run on that clock ^[17].

What the name buys is narrower than the press cycle suggests. Ruane's argument is that you have to know a species exists before you can say where it lives, what threatens it, or how to protect it ^[18]. The paper delivers the first item and very little of the rest. Ruane says knowledge of L. slashi remains limited because snakes are hard to observe before they leave ^[14]. Diet is an inference from dentition: snakes in the genus often have large teeth at the back of the mouth, which may serve to grip small slippery-scaled lizards and other reptiles' eggs, and this is not an animal that constricts ^[15]. Conservation planning here begins with a binomial, a scale count and a hypothesis about lizard eggs.

There is a quieter implication in the method. If appearance was not sufficient to separate this animal from its relatives ^[10], appearance was probably not sufficient when those relatives were separated from one another either. That is an argument for going back through museum drawers, not only back into the forest.

The celebrity epithet is the cheapest component and the only one that travels. Ruane, senior author and associate curator of herpetology at the Field Museum, says she settled on the name after rereading a Reptiles Magazine interview she first read at twelve, bought for a cover photo of Slash holding his pet reticulated python ^[12][20]. Slash, for his part, said he was honored and humbled and had never imagined the moment would arrive ^[3]. None of that changes the sequencing bill or the number of nights needed at the base of trees. It does mean one 71-centimeter snake will be findable by people who will never open Zootaxa ^[4], on an island whose dense tropical forests remain poorly studied ^[16].