We spend a lot of time here at PitchKnives thinking about the peculiar feeding habits of one particular species, but what about all the other eaters out there? This was the question that came to me when Jason sent me this pretty awesome video about aye ayes. Aye ayes are a kind of lemur with a wicked-looking middle finger/ultimate grub-hunting tool. Seriously, just watch the video.
Mom! We’re hungry!
But this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of some of the weird animal noshing that’s happening out there. Take the caecilian, for instance, a wormy-looking amphibian that lives in South America and Africa. Since the mother caecilians don’t want to leave their young to look for food, the young just strip the skin off their mom with special fangs and subsist on it. And then she regenerates it so they can do it again. So happy almost-Mothers Day, you lucky ladies out there! At least your babies (probably) did not repeatedly flay you and feast on the remains.
Or what about the male nursery web spider who meticulously gift-wraps a tasty insect in his silk in order to present it to a potential mate? It’s kind of like one of those Japanese gift melons that costs thousands of dollars. The really desperate male spiders (i.e. jerks) will even wrap up pebbles to try to fool the female spiders into mating. The female nursery web spider’s favorite song is the TLC song “No Scrubs.”
Most people have heard of vampire bats and been reassured that they’re not as scary as they sound, rarely biting humans and even more rarely turning them into Dracula-like coffin dwellers. They usually bite and lick the blood of large livestock, mostly cows and horses. But hold on a minute! Here’s something to revive those nightmares: they often urinate on their victims to mark them and return to the same animal night after night. So if you wake up with strange incisions and smelling of bat pee, try not to panic but…it’s coming back!
Getting a good meal in the wild can obviously be grisly tooth and claw kind of stuff, but when it comes to the skua, an Arctic sea bird, it can also be sort of like a high school locker room. That’s because they’re big bird bullies, who terrorize seagulls so badly that the seagulls just yak up their lunch in fear. Then, while the seagulls run off to make appointments with their therapists, the skua eats the barf and laughs about it with his friends.
Seriously, I could go on like this for days, but instead I’ll leave you with one last study that will make you wonder how much difference there is, really, between you and all your fellow creatures. Male fruit flies who were sexually rejected by females were far more likely to feed on an alcoholic substance than a non-alcoholic one. Scientists hypothesize that they were trying to stimulate some kind of pleasure center in their tiny fruit fly brains that, sadly, they had not managed to tend to otherwise. It’s alright, little guys. We all need a stiff drink to lift our spirits sometimes. By the way, have you read Llalan’s beer column? You might as well choose a tasty one.