What Came First? The Chicken, the Egg or the… Gecko?

I literally came across the most disturbing news story ever on the ABC News website today. Not the violent or tragic or horrible kind of disturbing, as in some guy killing or raping a couple people, but the oh-god-too-much-information kind of disturbing more often associated with those commercials that come on late at night which seem perfectly innocent until they chuck the line “Now let’s talk about genital herpes” in there.

Some guy in Darwin, Australia, cracked open an egg while making dinner and found a dead gecko, a kind of lizard, inside. I wish I made that up, because it sounds like the beginning to the most awesome joke ever (with alternate endings where the lizard wakes up and says either “What, you have the technology to cook in Darwin now?” or “Hey, what’s the entire population of Darwin doing here!”)

Anyway, this guy happened to be the Northern Territory president of the Australian Medical Association, which is hilarious in its own right but I’m not entirely sure why. That’s not the disturbing part, though. Check this out:

[Darwin Guy] says he suspects the gecko entered the chicken before it entered the egg.

“Eggs are made inside chooks up this tube from their bottom.

“Now obviously this tube is in contact with the whole outside world.

“It has to be that the gecko climbed up inside the chook and died up there while the egg was being formed before the shell was put on it.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but a chicken’s ass isn’t the kind of place I’d wanna go for a summer vacation. I can see the gecko now: “Oh hey, a chicken orifice, I’ll just check out what’s up in here… wait, I… shit, what’s the… shit! Fuck, not again. Mum warned me about this!”

That’s so insanely fucking creepy, though. This lizard actually crawled inside a chicken, figured that perched on top of an embryonic KFC drumstick seemed as good a place as any to kick the bucket, and promptly got itself encased in carbonite an egg. At what point during its trip up a farm animal’s derrière did the gecko think this was a good idea? At what point during letting a small reptile CLIMB UP ITS ASS did the chicken think “Sure, why not?”

“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 is formed.

“So it’s a case of the gecko actually making its way through the cloaca of the bird and onto the developing egg.”

So. Freaking. Wrong.

Now, I should point out here that the reason this is considered newsworthy, other than the fact that it’s sure as fuck nothing else ever happens in Darwin, is because this kind of thing (you know, geckos regularly chilling out inside chickens) could be responsible for infecting eggs with salmonella and provide an explanation for how the potentially deadly bacteria is transferred – then presumably find a way to, um, stop it from happening. The fact that it was the NT’s Australian Medical Association PRESIDENT who happened to discover this incredible world first is apparently a huge immaterial coincidence and probably not at all related to any AMA funding for salmonella research which could come out of this incident. Either that or people finding geckos in chicken eggs is just really common in Darwin but no one thought it was weird until this fancy schmancy educated guy came along. Or no one else in Darwin even knew what a gecko was.

Either way, the whole thing was worth it just for the article’s lead in sentence: “The Australian Egg Corporation has expressed surprise at the discovery of a gecko inside a chicken egg.” – There’s also an Australian Chicken Corporation, but the two companies are currently locked in a deadly high-stakes lawsuit over which was established first.