The animals featured here look harmless enough, but in real fact, they are blood-sucking vampires who have adapted several ingenious means to get their regular fix of blood meal. Mosquitoes may be bad, but they have nothing on these 7.
1. Vampire finch
The tiny, ordinary-looking vampire finch is a close relative of its seed-eating neighbour, the sharp-beaked ground finch. Although they still eat seeds and grubs, the birds have also adapted their beaks to more violent use. To feed, they simply hop aboard a larger bird, and peck at the tail feathers until they are sitting in a pool of blood. Then the vampires jam in their beaks and go to town. They are particularly fond of defenceless chicks cowering in their nests.
The finches’ blood-drinking habits have allowed them to thrive even in the driest months. At peak feeding times, finches can be seen lining up behind a victim, patiently waiting their turn to dine.
2. Assassin bugs
While other predators go to the trouble of killing their prey, the assassin bug uses its rostrum to inject live victims with a mixture of enzymes and digest them from the inside out. As the target animal turns to soup, the assassin bug’s beaklike projection then doubles as a drinking straw for slurping up the soup – whether the victim is alive or dead. Most assassin bugs feed on insects, which they ambush using a range of nasty tricks.
The bugs are the leading source of Chagas disease, caused by protozoans which live in their gut and contaminate the wound as they feed. It’s a silent killer, quietly ravaging a person’s heart for the rest of their life.
3. Vampire flying frog
The frogs live their entire lives in the treetops, where they use their webbed fingers and toes to glide among the trees. Instead of risking predators by laying their eggs in streams or pools on the ground, females place the eggs above water-filled holes in the trees, whipping them up into a sticky foam with their back legs.
As the tadpoles hatch, they liquefy the foam and drop into the water below. But there is nothing for them to eat, so the mother returns to the hole and lays more eggs. They don’t suck blood or anything, they just use the fangs to scoop the eggs up into their big mouths, and suck them down whole.
4. Kenyan jumping spider
These spiders get their blood fix by preying on blood-filled mosquitoes. They are the only animals known to choose their prey based on what it has eaten, and the spiders are extremely fussy.
Given the choice, they only eat female Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, the main malaria vector in Africa. The spiders distinguish Anopheles mosquitoes by the 45 degree angle of their bodies as they rest, and they can distinguish a mosquito that is full of human blood from one that isn’t by smell alone. But how do they tell the females – which drink human blood – from the males that don’t?
In a painstaking experiment carried out by Ximena Nelson from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand; she found out that what the spiders prize above all else are fluffy, luxuriant antennae, and they always found the mosquitoes -in this case the female anopheles – that possess these every time.
5. Tongue-eating louse
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The parasite starts life as a male in search of a fish. Once it has found a suitable victim, it enters through the gills, crawls into the mouth, and undergoes a transformation. It plunges its legs into the base of the fishes’ tongue and gorges itself on their blood, growing enormously and turning female at the same time. Its eyes shrink and its legs expand.
Eventually, the fish’s shrivelled tongue falls off, and the louse replaces it with its own body. From then on, the fish uses the parasite as a prosthetic tongue. The female mates with males living in the gills, giving birth to a brood of live male parasites that swim off to start the whole grisly process again.
6. Vampire moth
They may look harmless, but not all moths are after nectar. Calyptra moths are found across Europe where they mostly use their piercing mouths to drink from flowers and drill under the skin of fruit.
But some have more bloodthirsty tastes. Siberian Calyptra thalictri have applied their long, barbed tongues to tap into the blood of vertebrates, including humans. Male Calyptra moths from Asia will feed on gigantic prey, tackling cattle, rhinos, and even elephants.
7. Vampire fish
The voracious catfish can wriggle into even the tiniest orifice and latch on, securing itself in place with backward pointing spines on its gills. Some species are just a centimetre long, although they can grow to around 40cm.
They mostly latch on to the gills of other catfish, although they are known to occasionally wriggle into open wounds.
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