Alex White thought he saw a giant worm writhing in a plastic-wrapped salad he had just brought home from a Sydney supermarket until a snake’s tongue moved.
“I was completely scared when I saw this little tongue coming out of my mouth and it started to move and I realized it was a snake because the worms have no tongue,” White said Thursday.
“It certainly scared me a little bit,” he added.
It was a pale-headed venomous snake that authorities said made a 570-mile (870-kilometer) journey to Sydney from a plastic-wrapped Toowoomba packing plant in Australia with two lettuce heads. .
The refrigerated supermarket supply chain probably brought the cold-blooded young man to sleep until White bought the salad from an downtown ALDI supermarket on Monday night and rode his bike home with a salad and snake in his backpack.
White and her partner Amelia Neate saw the snake move as soon as they unpacked the lettuce on the kitchen table.
They noticed that too the plastic wrap was torn and that the snake could escape, so they quickly put the reptile with the salad in a plastic container to store food.
White called the rescue organization WIRES and a snake handler took the snake that night.
Before the manipulator arrived, White said WIRES explained, “If it bites you, you have to go to the hospital very quickly.”
ALDI is investigating how a snake could have ended up in a supermarket.
“We worked with the client and the WIRES team to identify the snake’s natural habitat, which is certainly not an ALDI store.” the German supermarket chain said in a statement.
WIRES reptile coordinator Gary Pattinson said that although the snake was less than 20 centimeters long, it was “as poisonous as ever.”
Pattinson is taking care of the snake until he returns to Queensland next week, following WIRES ‘policy of restoring saved wildlife to its place of origin.
“It’s the first snake I’ve ever had on packaged and sealed products,” Pattinson said. “We have frogs in them all the time.”
Neate, a German immigrant, said brushing against a poisonous snake in a Sydney kitchen was an obstacle in his efforts to reassure relatives in Europe that the Outback wildlife has nothing to worry about.
“For the past 10 years, I have told my family at home that Australia is a truly safe country,” Neate said.
“I always said I was in town; here it is completely good “, he added.