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I actually got ahold the paper and read it, and any sort of "herbivorous snake" blurb is vastly overdone.
The bulk of the paper concerns the snakes scavenging from dropped fish or fish which washed ashore, and how these behaviors open up possibilities for how terrestrial vertebrates transition to marine life.
Buried within, though, is a short section in which they note a captured snake defecated a large mass (58 g) of undigested plant debris. They offered numerous different types of marine plant matter to captive snakes from this population, and all sniffed at it but refused unless it either was wrapped around dead fish, or scented with fish.
While the algae used in lab is claimed to be "digestible", no actual evidence of this was given in the paper (which swiftly moved back to the main topic of shoreline scavenging), and the defecation from the wild individual was undigested, which is consistent with prior views of the snake digestive system being unable to process plant matter (with the exception of pre-digested material present in the midgut and hindgut of ingested herbivorous prey items). Given that the snake defecated the algae, it must have already passed from the stomach into the intestines, and therefore survived the snake's best attempts at digestive processing.
I know the lead author, and he'll probably be at the scientific conference I'm going to in a few months, so I'll try to remember to ask him about whether the experimental feedings resulted in similar defectations of intact plant matter.
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