Eight bucks for strawberries? But they come with a sss-surprise!

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This article was published 22/01/2024 (645 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg man was in for a slithery surprise over the weekend when he found a dead snake in a box of strawberries at his local grocery store.

Ben Kahler stopped at the River East Plaza Safeway Saturday night for his weekly grocery shop and hit the produce section first.

At first he gawked at the price of strawberries — which were listed at $7.99 per container — but he was soon shocked by something else when he inspected a carton of the Ocean Spray brand berries.

Curled up in the plastic container amid the berries was what appeared to be a small snake.

“I turned it over and thought, ‘That’s a lot of leaves at the bottom of this one,’ and I realized pretty quickly those aren’t leaves,” Kahler (who works as a Free Press web editor) said Sunday.

“I was checking the strawberries to see if there were any mouldy ones, not for insects or snakes or anything.”

Realizing what it was, and suspecting it was no ordinary garter snake that is common in Manitoba, Kahler showed the box to a “horrified” customer-service worker and left the reptile with them. The snake appeared to be dead in the container.

“Everybody’s heard horror stories of tarantulas in the bananas, so I always kind of just checked now as a matter of habit,” he said. “The snake kind of threw me for a loop. That totally was something I’d never seen before.”

Analyzing photos of the shocking discovery, snake expert Curtis Fraser identified the snake as likely a rat snake, not much older than a few months.

The non-venomous reptiles are native to the southern United States and northern Mexico. The pint of fruit was labelled as imported from Mexico, according to Kahler.

Fraser said the breed of snake is commonly found in the pet trade and pose no danger to humans, but to find them hiding in produce is a rarity.

“I buy a lot of tropical plants from greenhouses and specialty-plant shops, and every once in a while there’s been a frog or a small lizard that gets carried in a shipment of plants accidentally. But snakes are particularly rare to find,” the snake educator said.

The serpents can grow to up to 1-1/2 metres in length and their diet consists primarily of rodents, though they also eat eggs and small birds.

So, how could this have happened?

“I honestly just think that he slithered up onto the (fruit) pallet in Mexico when they were loading and he got scared and stayed there,” Fraser said, adding the snake most likely froze to death during its travels. Snakes of that species will find hibernaculum (underground chambers to use as refuges) below the equatorial frost line during the winter months.

Kahler didn’t inspect the snake after eyeing it, which Fraser said was the right move on his part.

“It’s not always a harmless (rat) snake.”

Karen White-Boswell, director of communications for Safeway Canada parent company Sobeys, said the finding is being investigated with the fruit supplier.

There has been no recall on the shipment, White-Boswell said in an email.

While the incident didn’t bother Kahler enough to stop his shop, nor does he have a terrible fear of snakes, he’s not planning to buy strawberries again any time soon.

“I was kind of turned off from strawberries at that point,” he said.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca