YEAR OF THE TWO-HEADED SNAKE
2020 is turning out to be a bumper year for bicephalic serpents
Florida wildlife officials are looking after a two-headed snake brought in by a Ms Kay Rogers, after the cat had dragged the small, speckled snake into her Palm Harbor home in October. It was later identified as a juvenile Southern black racer ( Coluber constrictor priapus), a small, nonvenomous snake commonly found in the southeastern United States.
It had been captured by Olive, the family cat, and was named Dos (Spanish for ‘two’); each head is able to move its eyes, neck and tongue independently, and Dos has two brains and two throats. “His biggest problem is eating,” Ms Rogers had posted on Facebook: “We are trying lots of things, but he has trouble coordinating his two heads.”
Dos is now being cared for by Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission after Ms Rogers handed him over to them following their warning that he would be unlikely to survive if released into the wild. His pair of independent, competing brains make it difficult to eat and escape from predators.
The condition, known as bicephaly, is a relatively rare abnormality that occurs during embryonic development, when identical twins fail to fully separate. The condition has been observed in all sorts of animals, including deer and porpoises.
Living bicephalic snakes are usually encountered by humans only once a year. In 2019, a bicephalic baby rattlesnake (later christened Double-Dave) was spotted in New Jersey, while a two-headed viper slithered onto a family’s property in Virginia in 2018.
But in 2020, Dos has a bicephalic rival in the form of Double Trouble, a young rat snake found in September by Jeannie Wilson of Taylorsville, Alexander County, in North Carolina. She told a local TV station how she had come across the one-foot long (30cm) reptile while cleaning her conservatory. “I saw something in the corner of my eye, and I said, ‘Lord, that's a snake!’ The first thing I thought was, ‘Oh gosh, something has stepped on you and mashed your head’.” She says Double Trouble is “very gentle to handle” and has never tried to bite her. She took the snake to the Catawba Science Centre in Hickory, where staff identified him as a four-month-old member of the rat snake family, and emphasised the rarity of Ms Wilson’s find: only one in 100,000 baby rat snakes will have two heads. Independent, 13 Oct; [UPI] 22 Oct; livescience. com, 27 Oct 2020.