My boss, Paul Stamets, shot these pictures in one of our mushroom grow rooms last Thursday. Jim, a fellow employee, was running around emptying mouse traps when he came across this cool-but-grisly scene in Grow Room 2.

Being an environment of high humidity and relvatively controlled temperature, our grow rooms are naturally host to a largish population of frogs of varying species and size. We welcome their presence, as they help to keep the insect levels down. (Only one customer I know of has ever been enough of a chimp to ask if our mushrooms are contaminated with frog droppings as a result. No, they’re not. Where do people find the time in their day to worry about shit like this? Um, no pun intended. ;-))

Naturally, where conditions are favorable for a given species, predators will also congregate. This two-foot-long garter snake has doubtlessly been cruising the rooms for most of its life, hoping for an opportunity to take down one of these free-range delicacies.

The ex-frog depicted here is—was—one of our true veterans, a batrachian hulk christened Moses by our previous growroom manager. Sorry Damein, I know you must be heartbroken over this. Ah, well, ashes to ashes, dust to snake poop.

Despite what would seem here to be an impossible task, the garter snake (I think I’ll call him Mister Creosote) did manage to get Moses all the way down (“Go down, Moses, wayyyy dowwwwn in snaaaakie belllly….”), though I wasn’t there for the dessert course.

According to Paul, after dinner Mister Creosote tried to slither out of the grow room, but was so overloaded that he couldn’t make it over the two-inch door sill. 😀