Natural science museum's two-headed snake gets new digs
The two-headed snake that's a "superstar" draw at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science now gets to curl up — unfurl, really — in a new 36-inch cylindrical showcase.
That's a 360-degree view for an animal that, with four eyes, hardly needs to turn heads to take it all in.
"He seems a lot more content," visitor Jessica Deleon of Utica said, peering into the clear curved case. "He's moving a lot more than the last time I saw him." She brought Kayla, 8, and Bowen, 6, for their first look. Spotlighted in the center of the dark aquarium hall, the snake stands out, his patterns contrasting against the reddish pine bark bedding.
The two-headed gray rat snake, now 13, was just a hatchling when he was donated to the museum in 2003.
Donor John Rushing, now of Monterey, Louisiana, was living in Jayess at the time. He was home, cleaning out around some shrubs, thinking about making a flower bed. "I had got my chainsaw out and was cutting ... down around the bottom of it when the snake come rolling out, and it was about 8 inches long."
He saw it belly side first. At a glance, he thought his chainsaw had caught it in the mouth and torn it. "It looked odd." Not knowing what kind of snake it was — "we do have ground rattlers in that part of the country" — he grabbed a limb and gently rolled it over. "It coiled up and then I could tell it had two heads, and I thought, ah! You've gotta be kidding!'
"I was all excited. Man, I thought that was the neatest thing." He picked it up with a stick, put it in a 5-gallon bucket and called his daughter, who dubbed the creature "Two Head." "My wife wasn't real thrilled about it," he said. "She wasn't going to let it stay at our house that night." That's how it wound up at the museum the same day. Zoologist Tom Mann told him to bring it on up.
The museum was eager to get the snake and try to raise him. "And he's a native Mississippian anyway."
Its first shed would be critical. Rushing remembered hearing from former aquarium coordinator Terry Majure, all excited when that happened, "this thing's going to make it!"
Rushing and his family have been to visit the non-venomous rat snake several times since. "You can tell, every time we go up there, it's obviously the house pet," he said. "He's real docile."
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At first, the snake was in an aquarium against the wall, with an artificial stone background. But the conjoined reptile, with a more dominant right head, would scrape the left head against the background, aquarist John Hardy said. That caused some injury still visible today in scar tissue. From there he was moved to a 24-by-24-inch tank, his home for years until he eventually outgrew it. Hardy said he's been on a two-year crusade to get this custom-designed, custom-built exhibit case. Its curvature makes sure one head won't push the other into a corner.
The snake is the "superstar" at the museum, and kids often run right to it. "He's pretty famous."
Gray rat snakes eat mice, rats, baby birds and eggs. This one eats fuzzies, which are baby mice, Hardy said. "A rat snake this size would typically eat full-size mice, but out of an abundance of caution, we feed it really small mice, to make sure we don't cause a problem where the esophagus joins together."
Its two heads are linked by a web of skin like that between a human thumb and index finger. Both brains and heads are fully operational, Hardy said. "Both eat, both drink." They're "pretty sure'" the snake's a male. At about 4½ feet long, he could be the largest and oldest two-headed snake in captivity, Hardy said.
The moment Hardy put him in the new enclosure, "he stretched all the way out and crawled in a big circle.
"I don't know how you judge happiness in a snake, but I judged that meant he was pretty happy."
Contact Sherry Lucas at slucas@gannett.com or call 601-961-7283. Follow @SherryLucas1 on Twitter.