Indian envoy warns of 'big red line,' days after charges laid in Nijjar case
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
Scientists have identified a tiny new species of dwarf boa living in the Ecuadorian Amazon that even a snake hater could love: These small reptiles are just a foot long.
Alex Bentley, research co-ordinator of the Sumak Kawsay In Situ field station in the eastern foothills of the Andes, stumbled across a small, curled up snake in a patch of cloud forest, an upland forest where clouds filter through the treetops.
He sent a photo of the snake to colleagues, including Omar Entiauspe-Neto, a graduate student at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and Butantan Institute in Brazil.
"We were immediately surprised, because it shouldn't be there," said Entiauspe-Neto, the corresponding author of the paper describing the species in the European Journal of Taxonomy.
Other dwarf boas have been identified elsewhere in South America and the West Indies, but none had ever been found in the region where Bentley spotted this one. The closest known match in Ecuador lives west of the Andes, and, according to Entiauspe-Neto, it looks "radically different" from the specimen in Bentley's photo.
While the snake didn't match any known species of dwarf boas, it had a lot in common with a specimen in the Ecuadorian Museum of Natural Sciences collected several years ago.
"We're usually afraid to describe new species based on only a single one, because there's a chance that there might be some sort of variation," Entiauspe-Neto said. "Once we had those two specimens, we were fairly sure they were a new species."
By comparing both the physical characteristics and genetic sequences of the mystery snakes with known species, the researchers determined that they'd found an animal new to science. They named it Tropidophis cacuangoae in honour of Dolores Cacuango, an Indigenous activist who championed women's rights and founded Ecuador's first bilingual schools with lessons in Spanish and the Indigenous language Quechua.
Like its fellow dwarf boas, T. cacuangoae is distantly related to the bigger boa constrictor, but they have key traits in common.
They both have thickset bodies, and their skeletons bear vestigial hip bones, relics of snakes' ancient legged ancestors. And instead of being armed with venom, they squeeze their prey to death, blocking blood flow and causing cardiac arrest.
While 10-foot-long boa constrictors go after animals as big as wild pigs, dwarf boas have diets that largely consist of small lizards. And since they don't have size on their side like true boa constrictors, dwarf boas have evolved a strange defence mechanism: When threatened, they curl into a ball and bleed out of their eyes.
This behaviour, also seen in horned lizards, might appear more gross than threatening, but Entiauspe-Neto suspects the behaviour is part of a bigger constellation of death feigning found throughout the animal kingdom.
"Most predators tend to feed on living prey," he said. If a predator such as an eagle sees a dwarf boa coiled up and bleeding from its eyes, "the predator is very likely to think that the snake might be either sick or dying, so therefore it will not feed on it" to avoid catching whatever made the snake seem ill.
However, dwarf boas face far bigger threats than predators: The newly identified species may already be endangered due to habitat loss. "It has a fairly small range," Entiauspe-Neto said. "So while it still needs to be formally evaluated by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), I think it might be threatened with extinction."
Thaís Guedes, a researcher at the State University of Campinas in Brazil who was not involved with the study, praised the work. "I am always happy when I see a new species of snake being introduced to the world," Guedes said.
Honouring activist Cacuango in the naming of the species is also important, she said, since Indigenous peoples play a key role in conservation.
India's envoy to Canada insists relations between the two countries are positive overall, despite what he describes as 'a lot of noise.'
With Donald Trump sitting just feet away, Stormy Daniels testified Tuesday at the former president's hush money trial about a sexual encounter the porn actor says they had in 2006 that resulted in her being paid to keep silent during the presidential race 10 years later.
The U.S. paused a shipment of bombs to Israel last week over concerns that Israel was approaching a decision on launching a full-scale assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah against the wishes of the U.S.
Footage from dozens of security cameras in the area of Drake’s Bridle Path mansion could be the key to identifying the suspect responsible for shooting and seriously injuring a security guard outside the rapper’s sprawling home early Tuesday morning, a former Toronto homicide detective says.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
Susan Buckner, best known for playing peppy Rydell High School cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1978 classic movie musical 'Grease,' has died. She was 72.
Accused killer Jeremy Skibicki could have a challenging time convincing a judge that he is not criminally responsible for the deaths of four Indigenous women, a legal analyst says.
A Calgary bylaw requiring businesses to charge a minimum bag fee and only provide single-use items when requested has officially been tossed.
Two Nova Scotia men are dead after a boat they were travelling in sank in the Annapolis River in Granville Centre, N.S., on Monday.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.