I can imagine this actualy occurring between the low-level employee who spots the snake, and the game of telephone that occurs as the news travels up the command hierarchy to reach someone with authority to do something about it

Which is the tradeoff issue with hierarchies; you want the person at the bottom to be sufficiently autonomous to deal with the problem, as he’ll have the most information about it, but at the same time, its the person at the top who has the global knowledge to determine how it actually effects the rest of the ecosystem. But as the information travels up the chain, it gets (necessarily) aggregated and details are lost