Aiken's snakin': Reptile with two heads thriving in captivity under care of local woman

Sep. 9—Life can be difficult for a snake with two heads, but Trick and Treat is thriving with some help from Aiken resident Jessica Sharp-Miner.

When Trick and Treat faces a challenge, she responds quickly.

Sharp-Miner used the pronouns they and them recently while talking about her experiences with her unusual pet.

Trick and Treat's condition is known as bicephaly.

"Essentially, they're like Siamese twins," she said. "At one point, they tried to bite each other, and their heads got locked together, which in the wild would have killed them. I had to sit there carefully and dislodge one head from the other."

Molting, something that is usually routine for other snakes, creates a problem for Trick and Treat.

"Snakes usually shed their skin in one complete piece," Sharp-Miner said. "But because of the way their heads are, they get stuck. I usually have to soak them in something moist and use a Q-tip to help them. They tend to shed (the skin on and near their heads) in little pieces."

In addition to Trick and Treat, who is a 4-year-old black rat snake, Sharp-Miner owns 16 other reptiles.

They include an 8-foot-long boa constrictor, tortoises and a Sudan plated lizard.

"They were actually found in someone's garden," said Sharp-Miner of Trick and Treat. "It was somewhere in South Carolina. I don't remember exactly where, honestly. They were probably a couple of weeks old at most."

Sharp-Miner got a phone call and agreed to give Trick and Treat a home.

"Because there are two heads with two separate brains, they wouldn't have survived long in the wild because they couldn't really communicate correctly," she said. "And because of the difficulty they had communicating, it was assumed that they wouldn't be able to hunt correctly."

Even though Trick and Treat no longer had to search for food or avoid predators, there were struggles in captivity at first.

"They would go in separate directions and then they would get stuck" while trying to get around an obstacle from different sides at the same time, Sharp-Miner said.

"But they've grown and adapted," she continued, "and now they're very good together. They've gotten pretty good at figuring out how to back up."

Sharp-Miner, who recently was hired as an educator at USC Aiken's Ruth Patrick Science Education Center, refers to the snake's left head as Trick and its right head as Treat.

"Trick is dominant," she said. "So when they want to move, often Trick will put his head on top of Treat and they'll move as a unit, which is really cute."

Sharp-Miner feeds Trick and Treat frozen mice that have been thawed.

"Both heads can eat," she said. "When they were little, I would feed each head. I would feed one and wait and then feed the other. But now that they're older, they've become quite shy about eating. So now I put two mice in their tank and leave them alone, and they figure it out."

Two-headed snakes typically occur when "a developing embryo begins to split into identical twins but then stops part way, leaving the twins joined," according to a story on nationalgeographic.com.

Based on multiple sources, only one in 100,000 snakes born in the wild have two heads.

From its heads to the tip of its tail, Trick and Treat is "a little over" 2 feet long, Sharp-Miner said.

"They're cool," she added.

And they also "can be a little bit feisty," Sharp-Miner revealed. "If they don't want to get picked up, they'll give me a little hiss, but they're pretty well-behaved."