Sweet snake of mine
An LSU biologist went hunting in the dark. He came back with a species that didn't have a name, so a colleague named it after one of her favorite rock stars.
For Chris Austin, an LSU biologist and curator of herpetology at LSU’s Museum of Natural Science, prowling the dark forests of New Guinea comes with an occupational hazard: the snakes he's after may spot him first.
Venomous ones are everywhere, the real threat now that cannibalism is just a story people tell about the place. Eating people fell out of fashion around the time Richard Nixon slunk out of office.
The details: Austin's dangerous night work turned up five specimens of a snake science had never cataloged, and a chance to honor one of rock's more reptile-friendly guitar heroes.
The new species is 28 inches of reddish-brown, non-venomous snake. Its name is Lielaphis slashi, for Slash, the former lead guitarist of Guns N' Roses. But the name didn't come from Austin. It came from a collaborator who loves reptiles and rock.
Sara Ruane, who worked with Austin at LSU, was a Guns N' Roses kid who fell for reptiles before she hit her teens. She was 12 when she learned that Slash shared the obsession.
"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.'"
How they did it: Finding a strange snake is only the opening act. Austin worked at his LSU lab with researchers at Chicago’s Field Museum, where Ruane is now a scientist, to prove the five specimens were an undocumented species.
- The team sequenced the snake's DNA with next-generation technology.
- It scrutinized the specimens' physical traits, the morphology, meaning form, shape and how a creature is put together.
- The genetics and the anatomy agreed.
The bottom line: Slash helped make “Welcome to the Jungle” unforgettable. Now, thanks to a team of snake-hunting scientists, his name will live on in a snake species.
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