The double-headed serpent is housed inside Northern California’s largest reptile shop and has already eaten nine times to great success.
The odds of being struck by lightning are comparatively high; you’d likely get hit by an atmospheric bolt about 215 times before you’d ever get bit by a shark — a one in roughly three million happenstance event. But for a reptile to be born with two functioning heads is an entirely different scale of rarity … think about one in four hundred million births.
Those odds are further inflated when factoring in the six-month survival rate of bicephalic animals is exceedingly low with the majority of two-headed animals dying within the first 24 hours of birth. However, right here in the San Francisco Bay Area, a young two-headed California kingsnake has bested those odds and made it past its six-month hatch date, showing no signs it won’t reach its first birthday and beyond.
“Announcing our two-headed California Kingsnake,” reads an introductory post on Instagram by East Bay Vivarium, a specialty exotic pet shop in Berkeley that focuses on reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates. The California king snake, Lampropeltis getula californiae, hatched at the facility with an immediately recognizable peculiarity: it had two fully functional heads.
Two-headed snakes are animals steeped in mythology. The Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and many Mesoamerican civilizations have depictions of “double-headed serpents” throughout their cultural folklore, often representing a time of rebirth and renewal. With the ongoing perpetuation of herpetolocutlure and growing popularity of keeping reptiles, including snakes, two-headed reptiles, particularly in serpent and turtle species, have become more common in the pet trade. (This, however, isn’t a result of selective breeding, but rather a consequence of the law of averages being played out.)
According to the pet store, the snake — a male — just reached its “6-month birthday” and is doing remarkably well. Over a hundred Instagram users were quick to ask questions about the animal, notably those related to its mobility, cognition, and overall ability to function on this mortal coil.
In a nut shell, East Bay Vivarium confirmed that while the snake’s motor skills are “meh,” there appears to be no cognitive issues or outright health concerns; the snake, too, is eating frozen-thawed rodents just fine, though one of the heads seems to be somewhat shorter and posses smaller eyes; like virtually every two-headed snake, the presence of a more “dominant” head is evident, though each head shows signs of an individual personality and awareness … which poses the question if this is really two snakes that, through some means of cellular splicing, are traped in one body.
A shared x-ray shows how the snakes effectively share a single body, but each head has an individual spine that forks about a fourth of the way down. The majority of each snake’s neck is efficiently fused with the other, sans a small portion at the top. And that would imply each head possesses its own head and neck anatomy.
As for if they share a heart? Probably. But what’s crystal clear is that this two-headed snake has taken ours … and become our newest hyperlocal fixation, too.
Update (05/09): Since we posted about this lil’ sweet angel — the first publication to do so! — the SF Bay Area has caught wind of him and decorated the two-headed snake with ample coverage; the Chronicle made the snake a cover star on a print issue last week. Since we highlighted the endotherm, East Bay Vivarium has continued sharing updates on the snake — which is really two snakes, now named Zeke and Angel. The two are eating well, remain friendly and without any apparent cognitive problems, and are even shedding their skin well.
