Two-headed snakes frequently appear in Yuhang, Hangzhou, is it really an ominous sign?

In the early morning of the day before yesterday, a resident of Yuhang, Hangzhou, was walking by the pond and found a "strange guy" - a "fish" with four legs. He caught the weird guy and kept it in a white storage tank. in the box.

Everyone thinks that this fish is like the giant salamander, a national second-class protected animal. It is also called the salamander because of its sound like a baby crying.

However, there has never been a giant salamander in Yuhang, Hangzhou, so everyone is not particularly sure of the identity of this strange fish, but can only find experts for identification.

Until yesterday, the identity of this "fish" was finally determined. That's right, the giant salamander is 40 cm long, 1.5 kg in weight, about 1 year old, and has no traces of artificial breeding, so it can be judged that it is pure wild.

The giant salamander is not a fish, it is an amphibian, but it has extremely high requirements on the habitat environment, so experts judge that this has a lot to do with the ecological environment of Yuhang, Hangzhou, and the improvement of water quality.

In fact, Hangzhou Yuhang is doing a good job in environmental protection now, which is reflected in the fact that all kinds of wild animals have settled here, including all kinds of rare birds and insects, and some precious mammals are often photographed.

However, there is a kind of snake that has been frequently reported in recent years - that is the two-headed snake in Yuhang. The reason why there is a turning point here is because there are rumors that this kind of snake is an ominous thing.

According to ancient texts, in the Spring and Autumn Period, the minister of Chu State, Sun Shuao, saw a two-headed snake when he was a child, but in order to prevent more people from seeing this ominous thing, he killed the two-headed snake and buried it, thus reflecting his self-sacrificing character since childhood. .

The two-headed snake does not really have two heads, but its tail is different from other snakes. It does not become smaller and smaller, but looks almost exactly the same as the head. From a distance, it looks like it has a head and a tail. Each head is the same.

The name of this kind of snake is blunt-tailed two-headed snake. Considering the territory of Chu State at that time, Sun Shuao should kill this kind of snake, not the "two-headed snake" that really grows two heads due to genetic mutation.

Since the blunt-tailed two-headed snake has relatively high requirements on the habitat, its appearance can only indicate that the environment has indeed improved. As for the "ominous thing", I think it should be related to its habits and strange appearance. There are relationships.

Why do snakes have two heads?

The blunt-tailed two-headed snake is a snake that is unique to parts of southern China and some areas of northern Vietnam. It belongs to the Snake family in terms of classification. The snakes in this family are basically non-toxic, and many of them are not particularly easy to live. It's no surprise that there are some weird traits in evolution.

Some of them imitate venomous snakes and look like venomous snakes to reduce their risk of predation, a process called mimicry.

In fact, the tail of the blunt-tailed two-headed snake is also a mimic, it imitates a snake head and tries to scare away predators.

I don’t know what you think of when you see this snake. It is estimated that many people will think of large earthworms. In fact, the life style of this snake is basically the same as that of earthworms, because their main food source is earthworms.

When they stick their real heads underground to catch earthworms, the tails move around like another head to enhance the illusion, as if telling the predator: Don't come here, I see you.

In nature, it is not only the blunt-tailed two-headed snake that uses this survival strategy. Many animals like it that wriggle and need to stick their heads into gaps or underground to hunt have similar strategies.

For example, some highly venomous sea snakes need to stick their heads into the sand to hunt for food. Although they are highly venomous, in order to prevent them from being attacked by other animals, their tails become similar to their own heads. The purpose is to confuse them. Animals that may die.

It's just that many animals are slightly camouflaged, and the blunt-tailed two-headed snake really imitates a "head". Even the markings around the head are almost the same, and the rhythm of the head and tail when crawling is basically the same. If you If you don't look carefully, you can't tell which side is the head at all.

However, the fake head of the tail has no mouth, so it can't spit letters, and it has no eyes. You can see it if you look more closely.

Why did people in the past think the two-headed snake was ominous?

We said earlier that the blunt-tailed two-headed snake specializes in eating earthworms. In order to eat earthworms, in fact, their bodies have also undergone many changes, which makes them look very different from other snakes.

In order to wriggle in the soil, earthworms secrete mucus to reduce friction, but snakes can't do this. The strategy of blunt-tailed two-headed snakes is to make the scales extremely fine and smooth to reduce friction.

Therefore, in addition to their strange two heads, the distribution of scales on their bodies is also strange, which makes people uncomfortable to see.

Can you tell which side is the head?

In addition, they are highly adapted to underground life. Once they reach the ground, their crawling posture is very strange. A large contractor in Yuhang, Hangzhou shared a video of it before, and I personally really don’t want to watch it twice.

So, I think their strange appearance and way of life are one of the reasons why they are not lovable, and because they live underground most of the time and don't have much contact with people, most people will be relatively unfamiliar, which is easy to magnify it. strange features.

In addition to that, the timing of their appearance in general is not very pleasing.

We know that earthworms generally come to the ground during heavy rains and floods, and the two-headed snakes will follow their prey and climb to the ground. Maybe sometimes there will be floods when such two-headed snakes appear, so the ancients thought it would bring some ominous thing.

at last

Earthworms are scavengers and can only exist in soils that are full of organic matter. Those soils without nutrients are almost impossible to have earthworms, and naturally there will be no two-headed snakes.

Now the two snakes appear frequently, the reason can only be that the environment has indeed improved, and it also shows that people and wild animals are becoming more and more harmonious, and it has nothing to do with "ominous things".