Eggs Stashed Away in Wardrobe by Toddler Hatch Into World's Second Most Venomous Snake
A mother in Australia was stunned to find several highly venomous snakes slithering around inside her bedroom wardrobe after they hatched from eggs brought into the Queensland home by her son a few weeks earlier.
3-year-old Kyle Cumming had apparently used a plastic container given to him by his mother, Donna Sim, to collect the eggs after he spotted them near the family home in Townsville.
Sim says she had forgotten all about it by the time she stumbled upon the container in her closet, only to find it was now infested with Eastern brown snake hatchlings — the second most venomous snake in the world.
"Any venomous snake, as soon as it hatches, has all the apparatus to deliver venom because the first thing they have to do is catch and kill prey - it's a perfect replica of an adult snake," snake expert Steve Wilson of the Queensland Museum told ABC News.
While the snakelets' teeth were likely too small to break the child's skin, according to a rep from the North Queensland Wildlife Care, Wilson says if Kyle would have found the snakes before Sim, "there's a real chance that he may have been very seriously harmed or killed by them."
Luckily, this story ends happily with the snakes being released into the wild. "If they hadn't been found they would have been doomed - doomed and entombed," said Wilson.
