A highly venomous snake that hitched a ride in the car of an unsuspecting driver has been caught in Adelaide's largest shopping centre — after being on the loose for two days.
Snake catcher Jarrad Waye told ABC Radio Adelaide's Stacey Lee and Nikolai Beilharz it was the first time he had ever caught a snake in a shopping centre.
"Apparently one of the customers spotted it, they've notified head office," he said.
"I've had head office ring me, security have cordoned off the area, gave me a ring and said, 'There's a snake in Marion Shopping Centre'.
"I thought, 'That's a bit different, I haven't had one of those before'."
When he arrived, on Wednesday, Mr Waye found the red-bellied black snake had slithered into the roof cavity between the first and second floors.
With only 500 millimetres of room to work with, it became a near impossible task to find the snake.
"I said, 'I'm not sure what you want me to do', and they said, 'Start cutting holes, and find it'," he said.
"[I] spent a good hour-and-a-half, two hours looking for it — we were unable to locate it."
Mr Waye said he "called it quits" about midnight and returned to the store first thing the next morning, in the hope of catching the reptile before the shops opened.
"[I] still couldn't locate it, I said, 'It could be anywhere by now, it could be up and down the pillars, in the wall cavities, in the roof, it could be anywhere'.
"I said, 'It will come out in the next couple of days and make itself known because it needs sunlight to survive' ... and here we are two days later on the Friday night, it's come out and [it's] hiding behind a vending machine."
Snake tracked through CCTV
Mr Waye was able to catch the snake without incident, but without any knowledge of where the snake was from, it cannot be released into the wild.
"[The centre's] security team tracked it back through the CCTV footage and saw it jump out of a car on the second floor car park, and that person was totally unaware that that red-belly hitched a ride with them," he said.
"Because we don't know where this snake's come from it's an environmental issue to release it back into the wild where it's not from.
"It could have diseases, parasites, mites or ticks which are not in a certain area and [could] then spread into that area affecting other native animals."
The snake has been handed over to Cleland Wildlife Park.
While Mr Waye may have made the capture look easy, he did warn others it was best left up to the professionals.
"This is a lot of years and a lot of experience and training," he said.
"It's highly dangerous, I don't recommend anybody who doesn't know what they're doing to attempt it, but it definitely puts myself at 100 per cent risk of getting bitten."
