Bando is a 3-year-old, 6 1/2-foot snake - and not just any kind of snake. He is a wart snake or sometimes called elephant trunk snake. Bando's caretaker, Randy, has had Bando for two years, having purchased him from a California reptile dealer.

He is housed in an aquarium that is temperature-controlled and aquatic. Bando spends almost all of his time in the water, including feeding time. His diet consists of goldfish and he is feed once a week. Randy reports that Bando has had no problems in the past two years but recently appears to have developed an issue with his eyes.

Over the past few weeks, Bando's eyes have become more and more opaque. They are now to the point where Randy suspects Bando cannot see.

Initially Randy thought Bando's eyes were clouding over as they normally do right before he sheds his skin but even after a shed occurred, the opacity in Bando's eyes remained. Randy has yet to find a veterinarian to examine Bando so he took to the internet and eventually got me involved.

To understand what might be going on with Bando's eyes, it helps to understand a bit about the natural history of his species. For you aficionados, wart snakes belong to the genus Acrochordus, which includes three species of snakes. I suspect Bando is a Java wart snake because of his large size.

These snakes are native to parts of southeast Asia and spend most of their time in water. Their diet consists of aquatic life --- especially fish --- and they have a rough scale pattern, which aids in gripping fish as they coil around them when eating. In my clinical experience, these are very rare snakes in captivity. I personally have only worked with them in zoo collections.

There are many possibilities that could cause Bando's eye issues. But it is my suspicion that Bando's eye problem is directly related to his captive environment and, more specifically, the water he is kept in.

Anniella are pretty small animals, about as thick as a pencil and rarely more than 8 inches long. They spend their lives wiggling beneath loose, sandy soil, snacking on bugs and larvae.

They don't move fast or far, and the researchers say they may spend their whole lives in an area about the size of your dining room table.

Aside from that, scientists still don't know much about them.

"They are one of the most poorly studied reptiles in California," [Cal State Fullerton researcher James] Parham said. "Because they live under the sand, you can't see what they are doing, and you can't even do a mark-and-recapture because you can't reliably capture these things."

Parham and his coauthor Theodore Papenfuss, a herpetologist with the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, have been scouring the state for legless lizards for 15 years. When they began their research, only one type of legless lizard was known to live in California.

One of the four newly identified species of Anniella, the Southern California legless lizard, was found under some dead leaves in dunes at the west end of Los Angeles International Airport.

The Bakersfield legless lizard was found in three vacant lots in downtown Bakersfield.

The southern Sierra legless lizard was spotted in three dry canyons on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and the Temblor legless lizard was found in the oil fields around the city of Taft, on the southwestern edge of the San Joaquin Valley.

To find these lizards, the scientists scattered 2,000 pieces of cardboard and plywood throughout the state to create moist, cool areas, which appeal to the lizards. Then they returned months later to see if any of the lizards had shown up.