Here you were thinking that the story about alleged brown snake eggs in a NSW school sandpit was done and dusted. You fool! There’s always more to the story! Turns out that what began as a simple story about eggs in a sandpit has become a startling chronicle of deception, publicity-grubbing and armchair herpetologists run amok.
After we posted the yarn yesterday, our comments filled with people saying more or less the same thing: you can’t possibly know that those are brown snake eggs. The FAWNA volunteers who identified and removed the eggs were simply over-enthusiastic about their diagnosis of the problem. The eggs could belong to any snake or lizard.
It seems FAWNA were receiving many messages along the same lines – and they’ve addressed the issue in a Facebook post, confirming that “after much discussion” they had determined the eggs “may or may not have been a snake or a lizard”.
Gasp! Murder most foul!
Snake expert Bryan Fry of the University of Queensland told Guardian Australia that he was pretty confident they were snake eggs as the wildlife volunteers had assumed, but that it was impossible to determine exactly what kind of snake they were dealing with until the eggs hatched.
“We believe that we did the right thing by moving the eggs to a suitable location in the appropriate manner where they could hatch and disperse,” FAWNA NSW President Meredith Ryan said. When all’s said and done, having dozens of reptile eggs in a school sandpit is probably not ideal anyway. For the kids or the reptiles.
The plot thickens further, however: in an addendum to the above post, FAWNA confirmed that all of the eggs but one in the relocated nest had hatched. The remaining egg contained an embryo… which may or may not be snake:
Due to the fact of all of the controversy I went back and checked on the nest and found that all but one of the eggs had hatched. The remaining egg contained a small pink worm-like embryo with 2 eyes and no sign of legs. It may or may not have been a snake but the good news is that all animals have been released and living in the wild.
Hmm. Looks like we’ll never know… or will we? The top comment on that post begs to differ.
How deep does this rabbit hole go?
