While Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose has some serpentine dance moves, the lead guitarist, Slash, is the real snake-lover. He’s owned a variety of reptiles since he was young, including anacondas, Burmese pythons, and a red-tailed boa constrictor named Pandora (who earned a cameo in the “Patience” music video).
Slash detailed his extensive menagerie in an interview with Reptiles magazine in 1995, and that cover story resonated with 12-year-old Sara Ruane, now an associate curator of herpetology at Chicago’s Field Museum. Ruane recently returned the favor by naming a newly discovered species of groundsnake after the guitarist: Lielaphis slashi.
“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,” Ruane said in an article announcing the discovery of the species, which is described in Zootaxa.
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Compared to its namesake, L. slashi keeps a much lower profile. The genus it belongs to is poorly studied, in part because its members are elusive, nocturnal, and many share the same reddish-brown appearance. In fact, when Ruane and her team discovered a 28-inch specimen slithering through the underbrush of a dense New Guinea forest, they weren’t sure it was a distinct species at all. A combination of genetic analyses and morphological observations (like the number of scales on different parts of its body) revealed it was indeed its own snake.
“It’s incredibly hard to observe snakes in the wild before they slither away, so our knowledge about L. slashi is limited,” Ruane explained. “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.”
While L. slashi is new to science, it’s quite likely that it’s been threatened by human activity for some time. According to the team, coffee farming and mining are two industries encroaching on its habitat, and identifying new species is the first step toward conserving them.
But what does Slash think? “As a long-time herpephile, I’m extremely honored and humbled to have Lielaphis slashi from New Guinea named after me,” the guitarist said in a statement. “It’s really exciting, I never would have imagined this moment would arrive.”
Welcome to the jungle, L. slashi. 
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Lead photo by Chris Austin
