How do two headed snakes eat

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Travel A road trip in Burgundy reveals far more than fine wine. Travel My Hometown In L. Wallach also cites the case of a hermaphrodite two-headed snake, half male and half female, but calls this report "incredible" and unverifiable, since the specimen was lost. Herpetologists believe that although two-headed snakes wouldn't last long in the wild, they can thrive in captivity -- if they don't kill each other first. In September , two South Carolina kids hit the show-and-tell jackpot by finding a small snake with one head at either end of its body, each with two eyes, a mouth and a tongue.

Their mother observed that the two heads couldn't seem to agree on what the body should do. University of Tennessee herpetologist Gordon Burghardt says that the amount of time two-headed snakes spend fighting over which head gets to swallow the prey would make them highly vulnerable to predators in the wild.

Even in captivity, where both heads are well fed, they're often at each other's throats. According to Van Wallach, some heads learn how to get along with each other, some manage to cooperate partially, others never figure out that what goes into their stomach nourishes them both.

When one head attacks and kills the other and subsequently dies as a result, Wallach classifies it as a homicide-suicide and has documented many cases. Their venom, if toxic, take seconds to kill the strongest elephants, leave alone the humans. Even a thought about snakes can give people goosebumps.

Now, imagine a snake with not one but two heads. Polycephaly — the state of having more than one head —occurs in the same manner as conjoined twins are formed, where an embryo which begins to divide into identical twins pauses before completing splitting.