Slitherlink with a message

Question

^{An entry in Fortnightly Topic Challenge #48: Unusual tag mix}

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After pondering what my next puzzle would be about I decided to change my base towards the realm of slitherlink puzzles.

I found this krazy site containing a variety of non-standard grid slitherlink puzzles, and took some inspiration from there.

This is my favorite form: it contains squares, pentagons, hexagons, heptagons as well as octagons.

There is a question hidden in this puzzle, if you can answer it you earn the check mark.

Hint:

There is a hint in the flavourtext

Hint 2:

The digits in green form one big number

Answer 1

Solved Slitherlink:

Now, getting the question from the solved grid:

If we note the number of sides used by the highlighted shapes and write them all together, we get the string 10127723165147052514546427056312254361. None of its digits is greater than 7 (because every shape has 8 sides or less), so we can treat it like octal (Flavor text hints to changing bases). If we convert it from octal (base 8) to a handy base 26 using the alphabet...

We get the question, which is:

'How do Guam Tree Snakes climb?'

Thematically, the answer is that:

The 'lasso' themselves around the trunks of the trees, which can be stated as saying that the snakes "slither" and "link" themselves to climb the trees!