Poisonous snakes are washing ashore on New Zealand beaches. Why is this a big deal? Because New Zealand doesn’t have snakes. Until now.
Beachgoers often assume the snakes are washed-ashore eels because many haven’t seen a snake before.
Making the situation on the island worse is that there’s no anti-venom on the island—anyone that gets bit has a rough road to recovery. The silver lining? The most common snake is a venomous but non-aggressive species called the yellow-bellied sea snake.
The central hypothesis for why snakes are arriving is climate change. With warmer oceans and an increased frequency of storms, snakes are traveling further away from their typical homeland.
Turning this into a story: what if a tropical storm brings in a whole snake infestation?
The island is peaceful, and a small beach town is thrown into turmoil when a single snake is discovered. A week later, two are found.
The following month, the locals recover from a vicious storm and discover an entire nest. In this story, the snakes are all related and come from one mother, the size of an Anaconda.
A survival story—Snakes on a Plane meets Anaconda.
The townspeople form factions, and the main characters are a grizzled old gun-nut, a young adult girl and her boyfriend, and a mom and her daughter. Like Tremors, another classic, they work together and figure out how to save the town, eventually turning their sights on the mother snake and ending the infestation.
