Short comings

half the width of a piano string right at the top of the keyboard, he said. But Dawkins was keen to highlight the core of Darwin's natural selection. " The amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to say this, millions of animals are running for their lives, whimpering with fear. Thousands are dying from starvation or disease or Barbados. He believes the species is rare because most of its potential forest habitat has been lost to buildings and agriculture. " The Caribbean is particularly vulnerable because it contains an unusually high percentage of endangered species and, because these animals live on islands, they have nowhere to go when they lose habitat, " he says. Hedges determined that the Barbados species is new to science on the basis of genetic differences from other species and its unique colour pattern and scales. He also determined that some old museum specimens had been misidentified and actually belong to this new species. Hedges published his study of the new snake in the journal Zootaxa earlier this month. Hedges proposes the name Leptotyphlops carlae for the new snake, which he believes is the smallest of the 3,100 known snake species. At an adult length of only around 10 cm, it is considerably shorter than the previous record holder — which reaches a length of around 14 cm. Hedges believes the newly described snake may be at the minimum possible size for snakes, " Snakes may be prevented by natural selection from becoming too small because, below a certain size, there may be nothing for their young to eat, " he said. This snake, like its relatives, likely feeds on the larvae of ants and termites. Another constraint on smallness appears to be reproduction; while large snakes can produce dozens of eggs, the smallest snakes appear able to produce just one egg or offspring. And these offspring are proportionately very large compared to the adults. The hatchlings of the smallest snakes can be up to half the size of the adult whereas the largest snakes produce offspring just one-tenth of the adult size. " The fact that tiny snakes produce just one massive egg — relative to the size of the mother — suggests that natural selection is trying to keep the size of the hatchlings above a critical limit in order to …