ABC News: “Gecko in egg ‘must have crawled up cloaca’”
The Australian Egg Corporation has expressed surprise at the discovery of a gecko inside a chicken egg.
Darwin doctor Peter Beaumont was cooking dinner when he cracked open the egg and found the dead gecko inside the shell.
Health authorities say the discovery is nothing to be alarmed about and it is being examined at a laboratory.
The research and development program manager with the Egg Corporation, David Witcombe, says he has never heard of such a case before.
“Certainly the gecko wouldn’t have been ingested by the bird. It would be physically impossible for it to make its way from the digestive tract into the area where the egg’s formed. So it’s a case of the gecko actually making its way through the cloaca of the bird and onto the developing egg.”
The doctor, who happens to be president of the NT branch of the AMA, has postulated that this may be a salmonella breakthrough. Many reptiles carry salmonella in their guts. Perhaps there’s an epidemic of geckos taking refuge in cloacas, spreading salmonella that way.
Salmonella levels are much higher in battery farmed chickens than in free range chickens. Perhaps the caged hens are more prone to reptilian intrusions, unable to escape or fight back. Poor things. Go organic/free range if you eat eggs, mmkay?
Must get around to planning that chook pen.
Wait… that’s not a gecko at all.
That’s a basilisk!
Does it say in the report if anyone was turned to stone…?
I await the pics of the hound relaxing with the chooks, under a brolly, a la chez Sills Bend.
Ha. One of the bigger obstacles to building a chookpen is ensuring that it’s Lab-proof.
Wow, that’s pretty disgusting. The poor chook that had a lizard creep up its bum must have been totally unable to move.
I’ve got lots of the little buggers round the house. I once brought some dryer-dried sheets into the kitchen (outside laundry, heavy rain) and heard a rattling noise on the floor, as I flapped them to fold them, that proved to be a rather large, clothes-dryer-mummified gecko that had been inside the dryer. It surprised me less than it otherwise would have if I hadn’t had a really tiny one (about the same size as that eggy one) short out and totally destroy $K’s worth of split-system aircon/heating the previous winter by somehow finding its way into the outside unit and getting fried by the motherboard.