Two mouths for one stomach: a two-headed snake is found in Florida

Irina Ziganshina

A month ago, a domestic cat named Olive brought prey to its owners in the living room - a small variegated snake with two heads attached to one body, LiveScience reports.

Each head independently moved its eyes, neck and tongue. The family named the snake Dos: in Spanish, Dos means "two". As the owners of the cat say, the main problem of Dos is food: during feeding it is already difficult to coordinate the movements of their heads.

Two-headedness, or bicephaly, is a rare anomaly that occurs during the stage of embryonic development, when identical twins cannot completely separate from each other. Bicephaly occurs in many animals, from deer to dolphins, but the adage “one head is good” is not about them: it is difficult for such animals to survive in the wild, since catching prey and fleeing predators with two heads is more difficult than with one. Therefore, bicephals, when discovered, usually end up under the care of wildlife specialists.

Dos, for example, now lives under the supervision of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission (FWC). FWC experts, by the way, have identified the species of the two-headed snake - this is the southern black snake (Coluber constrictor Priapus), such snakes are found in the southern and central states of the United States.