A woman hoping to chow down on some grocery store-fresh salad had to put the kibosh on her meal after discovering a slithery creature tucked between the leaves.
The Guardian reports that Amelie Neate, of Sydney, Australia, grabbed a bag of lettuce from her local Aldi and and noticed something rustling in the plastic once she brought it home — and it wasn’t a crouton.
Neate said she saw a little brown snake coiled up in the bag of lettuce and, like a true Aussie, went “I’mma gonna bother that snake.”
“It was moving around and flicking its little tongue out,” partner Alexander White recalled, “which let me know it wasn’t a giant worm. I would have been more comfortable with a worm, to be honest.”
The two grabbed their cameras and took photos of the seven-inch snake. They also reached out to a local wildlife agency to help them identify the critter.
Turns out, it was a venomous pale-headed snake, which the two said was described to them as “medically significant” — meaning the snake has a penchant for striking multiple times and sending its victims to the hospital.
While the snake species hasn’t caused any deaths, their venom is pretty nasty.
According to the Australian Museum, “An envenomation can produce some unpleasant symptoms, including severe headache, blurred vision, localized pain, and abnormal bleeding.”
The couple moved the snake — and its lettuce-y home into a Tupperware — and contacted Aldi to let them know there was a snake in their salad.
After the critter was taken away and released back into the wild — the couple proceeded to eat the salad.
“I washed it thoroughly,” said White. “There were a couple of things that I had determined to be snake poo but I washed that off and had a salad wrap.”