Les Jones

Science > Kentucky Boy Finds Two-Headed Snake

A 10 year old boy in Kentucky found a two-headed snake that's being nicknamed Mary-Kate and Ashley. That boy was destined to be the coolest kid in his class until his dad gave the snake that sissy name.

The University of Tennessee has had two multi-headed snakes. One was a black rat snake. The other was a ringneck. Both were found in Tennessee, as mentioned in this story. A grad student in animal behavior showed me the black rat snake. (I forget the guy's name. Sowell, maybe? He was one of Gordon Burghardt's students.)

The grad student had done an interesting experiment with the snake. The question he was trying to answer was "What causes satiation of hunger? Is it chewing, or is it the presence of food in the stomach?" The snake had two mouths but only one belly, so it was well-suited for answering the question. He fed just one of the heads, and found that it was satisfied, but the unfed head wasn't. (In case you were wondering, he measured satiation by measuring the frequency of tongue-flicking for each head.)

If you can remember the name of UT's two-headed snakes, post in comments. You could win net.fame! Double net.fame for coming up with a better name for a two-headed snake than Mary-Kate and frickin' Ashley.