Today’s blog
Lynn Murphy Mark
Creepy but fascinating
Today’s blog is entirely based on an NPR report heard on my car radio on my way home from work yesterday. Now that I don’t have Sirius XM anymore, I can’t predict which of the MSNBC anchors will be talking at me when I turn on the car. NPR is full of surprises, and the best one is that they rarely speak about 45 and his antics. Which, by the way, are getting creepy in their own right.
But this is about a snake, known to scientists as Pantherophis obsoletus. The one in question is the black rat snake, known as Elapha obsoleta obsoleta I love that. (Some days I feel quite obsoleta myself.) It’s life span is 10 to 30 years and can on occasion grow up to 8 feet in length. There are plenty of them in Missouri in the wild.
I don’t know how I feel about snakes. I have a friend whose son used to keep them to breed as pets. They lived in her laundry room until one got out one day and was slithering its way along her kitchen floor. After that they lived in the garage, much to her son’s objections. I know because I lived in Florida that the Everglades regions have a huge problem with big pythons that multiply frequently. When we lived in Brazil, we were at the edge of a very dense forest and snakes found their ways into our house with regularity. One that looked venomous took up residence in the back of the upright piano. There was no pest removal service available. We called the zoo and they agreed to send a herpetologist (snake lover) to collect the snake.
While he was there trapping the harmless – according to him – creature, he noticed the staircase going up to the bedrooms and thought we would want to know that snakes can indeed climb stairs. He went into great detail about how a snake can launch the upper part of its body on to a step and then pull the rest of itself up. Launch. Repeat. Launch. Repeat. Soon it would be at the top of the staircase. No one slept well for several nights after that.
Yesterday I was in the safety of my car when my ear caught the conversation about a snake in captivity named Tiger Lily. The reason she has two names is because she has two heads, each with its own brain. One head is Tiger and the other is Lily. She is currently at the Powder Valley Nature Center as part of a special display going around the Midwest. Apparently this two headed business is a thing in the snake world, but having one in captivity that is five years old is very unusual. As if two heads with brains isn’t unusual enough, I learned that they have sisterly spats on a regular basis. Sometimes Tiger wants a drink of water and Lily is not interested. Then it is literally a tug of war to see who wins.
Both of them get fed. Tiger’s neck is a little longer than Lily’s and she’s been known to twist her neck and grab the mouse away from Lily. I don’t have a sister, but I understand this could be real in the human world – except for the eating mice part. Anyway, they have to put a solo cup over the head of the one not being fed to prevent such behavior. They both like to eat, and since they share one stomach, they feed each head to prevent any feeling of hunger. I laughed out loud when the commentator said that when they are tired of each other they make a T and separate their faces as far apart as possible.
I admit I was fascinated in a repulsed kind of way by this news segment and sat in my garage for a few minutes to hear the end of the report. Throughout most of the report I kept thinking that there are two-faced people who are similar to a two-headed snake. I’ll spare you all the examples I came up with, except to say that most of them are politicians.
Well, this is one of my more bizarre offerings. Keep in mind it’s educational!