Why snakes have forked tongues

Actually, it's to aid a snake's vomeronasal system a sensory system in snakes that is akin to smell. Snakes have forked tongues so that they can "smell" in stereo. If you listen to music holding only one side of your headphones to your ear , the whole orchestra sounds like it's crushed into one, tiny speaker.

If you put your headphones on correctly, using both ears, the music becomes more three- dimensional. Likewise, it's easier to judge the depth of a scene with both eyes open than with only one. The key herewith both ears and eyesis that your brain combines two different perspectives to make a more detailed, three-dimensional whole. Because you have two separate eyes and two separate ears, you can see and hear in stereo.

When a snake's tongue flicks out, the two tines of the fork spread as wide as they can. The tines flick back into the snake's mouth, and whatever chemicals each tine encountered in the environment are delivered to the snake's two, separate vomeronasal organs on the roof of its mouth. The vomeronasal organ also called Jacobson's organ is located just behind the nose and is only accessible via two thin grooves in the roof of the mouth.

The split tongue of a snake is thought to be advantageous because it allows the snake to smell in three dimensions. Since the two tips pick up odors from slightly different locations in space, the snake can detect the direction of the source of the smell.

Using a similar method, humans can often detect where a sound is coming from, thanks to the distance between our two ears. The tongue collects the particles in the air which creates odor and brings them into its body. This organ has many ridges on its anterior surface, creating a large surface area for a relatively small organ.

The Canadian Journal of Zoology published a study on what happens after the tongue returns into the mouth. From there, the sense particles are transferred into nerve signals.

What we know for sure is that snakes are not the only animals who use vomeronasal organs. For example, cats and horses also take in chemical signals in this manner, but they do not flick their tongues in order to do so. However, we do not use this organ anymore; it is now a vestigial organ, rendered obsolete through evolution. Researchers at the University of Connecticut posit that the snake uses its forked tongue to be more accurate and adept at tracking the animal it has smelled.

When the snake flicks out its tongue, it spreads out the two ends of the fork as widely as it can. The forked shape of the tongue provides two chemosensory edges with a space in the middle, rather than just one edge in a non-forked tongue. The chemosensory edges pick up on the pheromone trails of other animals.

This allows the snake to pick up two points on a scent trail at once, rather than just one. This, in turn, gives the snake a sense of not only where the prey animal was, but which direction it was moving. With only one tongue-tip in a non-forked tongue, the snake might just have to assume that the prey was somewhere in front of it, without knowing whether to strike to the right or to the left.

Among reptiles, forked tongues are always associated with animals that search widely as they forage for food. When a snake has a wide hunting ground, with its small animal prey sparsely distributed, it cannot afford to make mistakes about finding its prey.