Alex White thought he was seeing a huge worm twisting into a plastic-wrapped lettuce he had just brought home from a Sydney supermarket, until a snake’s tongue moved.
“I was completely scared when I saw that little tongue come out of his mouth and start moving and I realized he was a snake because worms don’t have a tongue,” White said Thursday.
“I was definitely a little scared,” he added.
It was a pale-headed venomous snake that, according to authorities, made an 870-kilometer (540-mile) trip to Sydney from a presence plant in the Australian city of Toowoomba wrapped in plastic with two lettuce heads. cos.
The refrigerated supermarket supply chain probably put the young cold-blooded specimen to sleep until White bought the lettuce at an ALDI supermarket in the city center on Monday night and rode his bike home with salad and snake in the backpack.
White and his partner Amelia Neate saw the snake move as soon as they unpacked the lettuce on the kitchen table.
They also noticed that the plastic wrap was broken and that the snake could escape, so they quickly put the reptile with the lettuce in a plastic container to store food.
White called the WIRES rescue organization and a snake handler took the snake that night.
Before the manager arrived, White said WIRES had told him, “If they bite you, you have to go to the hospital very quickly.”
ALDI is investigating how a snake may have arrived at a supermarket.
“We have worked with the customer and the WIRES team to identify the snake’s natural habitat, which is certainly not an ALDI store.” said the German-based supermarket chain in a statement.
WIRES reptile coordinator Gary Pattinson said that while the snake was less than 20 centimeters (8 inches) long, it was “as poisonous as ever.”
Pattinson is caring for the snake until it returns to the state of Queensland next week, following WIRES ‘policy of returning rescued wildlife to its place of origin.
“It’s the first snake I’ve had in packaged and sealed products,” Pattinson said. “We have frogs in it all the time.”
Neate, a German immigrant, said rubbing a venomous snake in a Sydney kitchen was a setback in her efforts to reassure relatives in Europe that the notoriously deadly Outback wildlife had nothing to do with it. what to worry about.
“For the last 10 years or so, I’ve told my family at home that Australia is a really safe country,” Neate said.
“I’ve always said I’m in the city; it’s totally fine here,” he added.