A newly identified New Guinea groundsnake named for Slash is genetically distinct from its relatives and lives in threatened forest habitat.
A 28-inch-long reddish-brown snake from the forests of New Guinea now carries a name borrowed from rock music: Lielaphis slashi, or Slash’s groundsnake. Its namesake is Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, aka Saul Hudson, whose interests outside music include a lifelong fascination with reptiles and support for zoos and museums.
“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.
The choice of name also has a personal connection for Sara Ruane, the Field Museum’s Associate Curator of Herpetology and senior author of a paper in Zootaxa describing the species.
“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 becoming a scientist with opportunities to give newly identified reptiles their official scientific names, Ruane returned to that childhood magazine story. “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.
The New Guinea snake finally gave her that opportunity.
A nighttime encounter revealed an unfamiliar snake
New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island after Greenland, lies just north of Australia and is divided between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Its dense tropical forests harbor extensive biodiversity, but scientists have not studied much of it in detail.
During fieldwork there one night in 2006, Chris Austin, a professor and curator of herpetology at the Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Science, encountered a snake 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.”
A decade later, after completing her doctorate, Ruane spent time working with Austin at LSU. In 2016, they began collaborating on efforts to better understand New Guinea’s poorly known snakes, a research partnership that has continued ever since.
Genetics confirmed a distinct species
Its outward appearance alone was not enough to establish that the snake represented a separate species. Laboratory evidence provided the distinction that researchers could not confidently see from appearance alone.
“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.”
Those findings combined genetic differences with physical traits, including differences in scale numbers, while ecological modeling indicated that the snake prefers a different habitat from related species.
Much about Slash’s groundsnake, however, remains unknown because observing these animals in the wild is difficult. “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 nevertheless provides some hints about how it may 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.
And despite Guns N’ Roses having been called the “most dangerous band in the world,” L. slashi does not produce venom capable of seriously harming a person.
While the snake presents little danger to people, the reverse may not be true. Human activity threatens the forests where L. slashi and other New Guinea species live.
“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.”
Reference: “A new species of Papuan groundsnake (Squamata: Colubridae: Lielaphis) from New Guinea” by Tianqi Huang, Christopher C. Austin, Justin M. Bernstein, Bulisa Iova, Jackson R. Roberts, Jeffrey H. Frederick and Sara Ruane, 11 August 2026, Zootaxa.
DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5866.2.6
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