Have you ever wondered what the closest animal to a vampire actually is? Vampire bats, leeches and mosquitoes tend to get all the credit, but plenty of other creatures feast on blood. Check out...
- The Helpful and Harmful Oxpecker
- The Needle-Faced Vampire Moth
- The Slightly-Cannibalistic Dracula Ant
- The Parasitic Sea Lamprey
- The Mosquito-Eating Vampire Spider
- The Vampire Finch
Be warned - if you're squeamish about gore, this one might not be for you...
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| Oxpeckers eat parasites, but can also attack their hosts (Nel_Botha) |
The Helpful and Harmful Oxpecker
Oxpeckers are strange little birds that live in a part helpful, part parasitic relationship with the beasts of the savannah.
On one hand they perch on the back of zebras, rhinos and cattle, picking off ticks and other nasty insects - very helpful for their hosts. They can also act as an alarm system - researchers found that the birds made a hissing warning call as humans approached, allowing the rhinos they were perched on to make themselves scarce.
On the flip side, oxpeckers have been observed feeding from open wounds (both eating tissue and drinking blood) on their hosts. They've even been observed opening new wounds on black rhinos.
Researchers have suggested that the oxpeckers may be both helpful and harmful. In conditions where their hosts are loaded down with ticks, the birds can feast on these blood rich parasites and improve the health of their hosts. When tick levels are low, the birds may actually become parasites on their perches!
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| Vampire moths evolved to punch through fruit skins (Didgeman) |
The Needle-Faced Vampire Moth
It's not just bats that get in on the blood sucking - Calyptra thalictri is a vampiric moth!
This taste for blood seems to have grown out of how the Calyptra moths feed on fruit. The insects have a sharp proboscis which can be stabbed through fruit to get at the fluids within - much like a drinking straw being thrust into a juice box!
Of course, what works on a tough skinned fruit could also work on an animal. The moth lands on a suitable victim (up to and including buffalo, tapirs, and elephants) and pushes its proboscis against the skin. The insect then wobbles back and forwards, slowly drilling through the hide and into the flesh below.
Only the male moths have been seen doing this - it's thought that they might actually be trying to obtain salt (something often lacking in a fruit based diet) that they pass on to females during mating.
These blood drinkers are happy to feed on humans, can drink for up to 50 minutes and leave a sore red mark slightly worse than a mosquito bite!
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| Dracula ants feed on their own grubs (Wounds_and_Cracks) |
The Slightly-Cannibalistic Dracula Ant
This ant hunts down other insects and drags them back to the nest where they can be dismembered and fed to the grubs. What's unusual is the Dracula ant doesn't consume any of the kill itself - in fact, it physically can't. Instead, the adults lightly wound their grubs and get them to "bleed" hemolymph (insect blood) that the adults lap up like a gore smoothie.
This process is clearly unpleasant for the grubs (they have been observed trying to escape from the hungry adults) but it might be good for the colony as a whole. By using the grubs as a combination of food processor and storage, Dracula ant adults can have highly specialized jaws and don't need a normal digestive tract.
Aside from the vampirism, some of these ants have jaws that move at over 200 miles per hour. They do this by pushing their mandibles together (a bit like snapping your fingers) and building tension. When the mandibles are moved to slide past each other, this tension is released in a lethal burst of speed.
These particular ants are thought to hunt centipedes (which have their own devastatingly toxic weaponry) which might explain why they need an overwhelming first strike!
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| Parasitic lampreys don't need the Demeter to cross the water (Pexels) |
The Parasitic Sea Lamprey
The sea lamprey is an ocean dwelling vampire of the ancient world. That might sound like an overstatement, but these primitive fish have remained more or less the same for over 340 million years. They don't even have true jaws - instead, this cartilaginous fish has a suction cup mouth filled with barbed teeth and a sharp, rasping tongue.
Parasitic lampreys prey by swimming up to other fish and grabbing on with their mouths, then boring through scales and skin with their tongue. This vampire slowly pulls blood from victims before eventually detaching - the ordeal isn't necessarily fatal, though smaller victims are probably doomed.
While lamprey attacks on humans are very rare (after all, our hands make us a dangerous proposition for a lamprey to latch to) they have been recorded attempting to feed on humans!
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| The vampire spider targets well-fed mosquitoes (FotoshopTofs) |
The Mosquito-Eating Vampire Spider
Did you know that there's a spider who (indirectly) feeds on human blood?
Contrary to what you might expect, spiders generally don't drink blood or even "suck the juices" of their prey. Instead, most spiders drool digestive fluids over their victims before mangling them with their mouthparts. Spider venom can also help digest the prey from the inside, with some turning victims into soup inside their own exoskeleton rather than chewing. In either case, the resulting meat slurry is slurped up by the arachnid.
The single known blood drinking arachnid is the vampire spider Evarcha culicivora. This little guy is a jumping spider, meaning that it hunts prey on foot rather than relying on a web. Its prey of choice is a female mosquito, specifically one that recently stole blood from a mammal.
Researchers found that the spider could identify these mosquitoes by sight or scent, targeting them more than sugar-fed females or males. By attacking these mosquitoes, the spider was able to obtain blood without the risk of biting a mammal.
Researchers have also found that the vampire spider is attracted to the scent of used socks - probably because the same scent draws in mosquitoes on the hunt for a human to bite!
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| Nazca boobies are a source of blood for vampire finches (pen_ash) |
The Vampire Finch
The Galápagos finches of Wolf Island have a gory secret. These small and seemingly inoffensive birds have developed a hunger for the blood of their fellow birds.
Wolf island is small and remote - the native birds can get a little nutrition from seeds and insects, but the real meals are to be found in the surrounding waters. This presents a problem to the finch, which is not a seabird by any stretch of the imagination.
The Nazca boobies who share the same island offered another avenue of survival. These much larger birds are happy to fish, but they also don't seem to mind being pecked by the sharp-beaked finches until they bleed. The resulting blood is lapped up by the small birds, while the Nazca boobies seem to suffer no lasting harm from the attacks.
As to why the larger birds put up with this treatment, it's possible that the finches once helpfully pecked parasites from their feathers (a bit like the oxpecker) but slowly moved on to drawing a little blood. Maybe the larger birds still haven't realized what's happening?
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