Animals Eat The Weirdest Stuff!

Ranger Rick, Feb, 2000 by Diane Swanson

By sucking a sweaty sneaker, butterflies get a salty drink. They also sip from soupy dead animals, moist poop, and pools of pee. Many other animals drink and eat some really weird things. Just look!

Plenty of animals eat poop. And why not? The droppings from one creature contain food that other creatures can use. What's more, poop is plentiful, easy to find, and it doesn't run away or fight back.

Some insects, such as the cottonstainer bug and its young in the photo below, feed on the juicy droppings of birds. Dung beetles prefer mammal poop. They even lay their eggs in it. When the young hatch, dinner is waiting.

Several kinds of fish devour poop daily, and many birds eat it at least now and then. For example, very hungry ivory gulls may gobble polar bear and seal dung.

Poop Tarts

Many rabbits, hares, and pikas gulp down their own droppings. Sounds disgusting, but it works. By eating the same stuff twice, they get more vitamins and other good things from their food.

Blood Slurpee

Feasting on the blood of living animals makes a lot of sense. The eater gets an easy meal. (Sure beats having to catch and kill something.) And it can often eat from the same animal again and again.

The common vampire bat at right, for example, has found a sleeping pig. With razor-sharp teeth, the bat has cut the pig's snout and is now lapping up blood. Chemicals in the bat's saliva will help keep the blood from clotting for about 30 minutes.

Other well-known blood-feeders are mosquitoes. They use their long, thin mouthparts to pierce skin and suck up a meal. Only the female mosquito feeds this way. She needs protein from blood to nourish her eggs.

Check out the mosquito below. While she sucks a person's blood, little red water mites are sucking blood from her! Now, isn't that a strange twist?

EYE Sips

Here's something that will make your eyes water. In Asia, there are moths that sip the tears of wild cows, buffalo, and elephants. Why do that? To get salt and water.

Like cats around a milk bowl, several moths may gather at one eye (right). They lay their long mouthparts on the eyelid or the eyeball and sip. To keep the tears flowing, some moths sweep the mouthparts across the eye. The cow or other animal may blink or shake its head. But the moths just flutter away--and flutter back.

Barf for Baby

Yum, yum, vomit for dinner! Like other chicks, this hungry gentoo penguin can hardly wait to eat. It's poking its whole head right into its parent's throat (above). The parent throws up a big meal.

Why do some parent birds do this? One reason is that a stomach or throat pouch makes a nice "pocket" for carrying food home. Another reason is that the soft, warm food makes an easy-to-eat stew for the babies. Some mammals, such as wolves and coyotes, use the same trick.

Some animals eat their own skin. If it's peeling off anyway, why let it go to waste? The skin is certainly handy, and it's chock-full of keratin (CARE-uh-tin), a kind of protein that helps their bodies grow.

Small lizards called anoles (uh-NO-leez) feed on insects. But each time they molt (shed), they may add a side order of peeled skin to their meals (above).

PEEL-a-Meal

Every year, most male deer grow antlers covered in velvet--soft skin with lots of blood vessels. When the antlers stop growing, the velvet dies. Then the deer rub it off and, sometimes, gobble it down (right). Later, they shed their bony antlers. And the antlers become another weird food. Gnawing animals such as rabbits, squirrels, and porcupines get calcium from the antlers. The calcium helps them grow strong bones and teeth.

Good and ROTTEN

MANY meat-eaters will chow down on an already-dead animal if they find one. But burying beetles go one step further. See the beetles above on the dead mouse? They're going to bury that mouse. Then the beetles will lay their eggs near the dead body. When their young hatch, they'll have a rotten dinner.

FAMILY Feasts

You've heard of human cannibals. Well, other animals can be cannibals too. Sometimes they need to be to survive. Take spadefoot toads: After a big rain, their tadpoles hatch in puddles. They need to grow fast before the puddles dry up. So a few tadpoles become meat-eaters--and gobble little brothers or sisters! (right)

So you see, animals have a lot of good reasons for eating weird stuff!