A snake that was exploring a broccoli field somewhere in southwestern Europe got packed up and shipped to a British supermarket
Without suspecting, Neville Linton, 63, picked it up together with a bag of vegetables and took the reptile home
Neville, who works in industrial cleaning, couldn’t believe his eyes.
“It was pretty frightening. I’m not good with snakes,” he said. “It’s lucky I didn’t just leave the broccoli out in the kitchen, or it would have been loose in the house.”
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“That would have been a huge risk for us because we have two vulnerable people living here.”
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Once he realized the creature was too big to be a caterpillar, he called his sister Ann-Marie Tenkanemin for help and she identified it as a snake.
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The pair popped it in a tub and went back to the Aldi store on Dudley Road where Neville made the purchase.
“I thought she was joking at first, but I backed off when I saw it start moving. The guy in the shop was pretty frightened too,” he said.
The snake was taken to a local zoo and its specialists determined that it was a young ladder snake
But herpetologist Dr. Steven J R Allain suspects it might be a viperine water snake
The reptile was transported to Dudley Zoo, and its staff believe it to be a young ladder snake. However, Bored Panda got in touch with Dr. Steven J R Allain and he tends to disagree.
“Having reviewed the [actual] photo of the snake in the broccoli, I am not sure the zoo identified the species correctly,” Allain told us. “To my expert eyes, the snake is in fact a viperine water snake (Natrix maura), which is a harmless fish-eating species found throughout southwestern Europe and northern Africa.”
Allain is a zoology graduate from Anglia Ruskin University, a Master’s graduate from Imperial College London, and a current Ph.D. student at the University of Kent. His current area of research is primarily based around barred grass snake (Natrix helvetica) population ecology and the effects of ophidiomycosis, but he’s also interested in amphibian disease and population ecology.
“Seeing as a large portion of the food grown and imported into the United Kingdom comes from the Mediterranean region, it is no surprise to find a species from this area turning up in some vegetables likely grown there. In my opinion, the snake was likely moving through the field at the time, before being scooped up by agricultural equipment, then seeking refuge within the broccoli.”
