Weird Animal Diet: 5 Species With Unusual Food Preferences

Some animals eat insects, their feces, and even their children. Still, they all faint compared to the weirdest diet in the animal kingdom.

1. Vomit-Eating Bird

While most seabirds survive by catching fish, the skua feeds on terror. It harasses its seagull cousins, dive-bombing and terrorizing them until they are so exhausted and terrified, causing them to throw up. As the victim rocks back and forth in a fetal position somewhere, the skua moves very quickly and consumes the curdled mass of partially digested seafood.

During winter, the terror vomit can account for up to 95% of a skua's diet. Sometimes, its victims do not have anything to throw up. In these cases, the skua will get sick of trying to scare it and will simply kill and eat the bird.

2. Tear-Drinking Moths

An adult moth lives only to mate, so it has little need for food. It stores up nutrients during the larval stage and lives off them like a storage bank. Normally, adult moths would prefer to sip nectar from flowers, but some have evolved to feed on sorrow literally.

Tear-drinking moths sneak up on larger animals and poke them in the eyes until they cry so they can drink the tears. Different species favor different victims, but they all prefer animals with no means of brushing them off.

3. Eye-Eating Shrimp

Ommatokoita is an eyeless, limbless, and wormlike crustacean. While most of its relatives survive by scavenging the ocean floor, this animal feeds off the eyeballs of the Greenland shark. This parasite burrows itself into the shark's eye and anchors itself there, drinking the host's eye jelly. As it sits there, it eats the shark's eyeball for the rest of its life.

4. Caecilians That Eat Their Mother's Skin

Caecilians are burrowing animals that look like earthworms but are amphibians, like frogs and salamanders. Unlike many other amphibians, however, the females build a nest to protect their offspring until they are large enough to fend for themselves. This is done so dutifully that they never leave them to look for food.

Every three days, the young caecilians employ specialized, temporary fangs, which they use to strip the skin from their mother's body. Fortunately, the caecilian mother possesses remarkable rejuvenation skills.

5. Beetles That Eat Unborn Snakes

Most beetles survive by eating poop, but a burying beetle has different and weird food preferences. A freshly mated pair of burying beetles buries an entire tiny animal corpse underground in one night. The female then spends the rest of her life feasting on the rotten meat for her larvae.

While Nicrophorus pustulatus engages in its relatives' "normal" corpse-burying ritual, it prefers to raise its young on a diet of embryonic snakes. If she can find a snake nest with eggs, the female beetle lays her own eggs near them. The larvae then sneak into the unborn reptiles, eat them alive, and use the eggshells as their own protective nursery.