Welcome to the jungle: newly-discovered snake named after Slash from Guns N’ Roses

Slash, aka Saul Hudson, is probably best known as the guitarist from Guns N’ Roses. But there’s more to Slash than his music. He’s also a lifelong reptile lover and an avid supporter of zoos and museums. And now, he’s the namesake of the newly discovered Lielaphis slashi: 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.

“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.’”

When she grew up to be a scientist who occasionally gets to give new reptile species official scientific names, Ruane thought back to the magazine article. “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.

Ruane finally got her chance with a 28-inch-long reddish-brown snake from the forests of New Guinea.

New Guinea is the second-largest island in the world, after Greenland. It’s located just north of Australia, and the landmass is divided between the countries of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. The island’s dense tropical forests contain untold biodiversity, but it hasn’t been well-studied by scientists. One night in 2006, Chris Austin, a professor and curator of herpetology at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, was conducting fieldwork in New Guinea when he came across an unfamiliar snake.

“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.”

In 2016, after finishing her doctorate, Ruane spent time working with Austin at LSU, and the two of them teamed up to start better studying the poorly known snakes of New Guinea and have been collaborating ever since on the topic.

Based on the snake’s appearance alone, it wasn’t clear that it belonged to a new species. But back in the laboratory, analyses made it clear that this was something different. "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.”

There is still a lot to be learned about 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. But features of the snake’s anatomy give some clues. “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. While Guns N’ Roses has been called the “most dangerous band in the world,” L. slashi does not produce any venom that could seriously harm a person.

While Slash’s groundsnake doesn’t pose a threat to humans, human activity could spell disaster for this snake and its fellow forest-dwelling creatures in New Guinea.

“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.”

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).