Rare, two vipers with two heads quarrel dinner

It is said that each of us is his worst enemy. This is especially true when you are a hungry snake and two-headed venomous.

One of these snakes – a baby, a two-headed copperhead – was recently discovered slipping around a family yard in northern Virginia. According to a statement from the Wildlife Center of Virginia, where herpetologists performed a medical screening on the snake several days ago, the rare joint snake has two brains, two trachea and two esophagus that lead to a heart and a set of lungs. shared. Both heads are able to catch and swallow prey – and that's where the problem begins.

"On the basis of anatomy, it would be better for the good head to eat," Wildlife Center staff wrote in the statement, adding that the right head seemed to have a more developed esophagus. "But that can be a challenge since the left head seems more dominant." [The 10 Weirdest Medical Cases in the Animal Kingdom]

Imagine that you are arguing with a second independent brain every time your body wants to have a snack, take a nap or even decide what direction to take. According to JD Kleopfer, a herpetologist in the Virginia Department of Hunting and Inland Fisheries, the constant struggle to make basic decisions like these makes two-headed or "bicephalic" animals vulnerable in the wild .

Two-headed snakes are known to struggle over who can swallow prey, and these animals may have trouble coordinating their movements when they react to danger. Most die young, wrote Kleopfer on Facebook; finding a living specimen in the wild is rare, and keeping a specimen like this alive will require a lot of care and luck.

For the moment, the two-headed copperhead is supported by a private herpetologist who has "a lot of experience in breeding and breeding vipers," writes Kleopfer. (Copperheads belong to the Viperidae family – and, yes, they are venomous.)

If the new found snake can be kept alive long enough, it will likely be given to a zoo or other educational institution to be exposed, the Wildlife Center wrote. This does not, however, prevent some motivated buyers from trying to slip into the good graces of the center. Today (Sept. 24), at least six people, including the owner of a private museum, offered to buy the rare snake from the state, the Washington Post reported.

Although live examples of bicephalic animals are exceptionally rare, two-headed creatures are born more often than you think. A two-headed deer was found dead in the woods of Minnesota earlier this year and a two-headed porpoise was raised from the North Sea in 2017. Last year, a flatworm – a species in which a single worm can breed after being cut into pieces, he pushed a second head on his buttocks as he boarded the International Space Station.

Originally published on Live Science.