Alex White thought he saw a huge worm wriggling in a plastic-wrapped lettuce he’d just brought from a Sydney supermarket until a snake’s tongue moved.
“I was totally panicked when I saw this little tongue come out of its mouth and start moving and I realized it was a snake because worms don’t have tongues,” White said Thursday.
“It certainly scared me a little bit,” he added.
It was a pale-headed poisonous snake that authorities say made a 540 miles (870 kilometers) trip to Sydney from a packaging plant in the Australian city of Toowoomba, wrapped in plastic with two heads of lettuce.
The refrigerated supermarket supply chain likely lulled the cold-blooded young man to sleep until White bought the lettuce Monday night at an ALDI supermarket in the city center and rode home by bike with salad and hose 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 lettuce in a plastic container to hold food.
White called the rescue organization WIRES and a snake dealer took the snake that night.
Before the attendant arrived, White said WIRES explained to him, “If you get bitten, you have to get to the hospital very quickly.”
ALDI is investigating how a snake can end up in a supermarket.
“We worked with the customer and the WIRES team to identify the snake’s natural habitat, which is by no means an ALDI store.” the Germany-based 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 venomous as ever.”
Pattinson takes care of the snake until he returns to the state of Queensland next week, under the WIRES policy of returning rescued animals to their place of origin.
“It’s the first hose I’ve ever had on packaged and sealed products,” said Pattinson. “We have frogs in it all the time.”
Neate, a German immigrant, said brushing against a poisonous snake in a Sydney kitchen was a setback in her efforts to reassure relatives in Europe that the notoriously deadly animals in the Outback had nothing to worry about.
“For the past ten years, I’ve been telling my family back home that Australia is a very safe country,” said Neate.
“I’ve always said I’m in town; it’s totally fine here, ”he added.