All living things must eat in some way…whatever the shape of their mouth. And there are some truly bizarre mouths in the animal kingdom. Some of the most unusual examples are enough to surprise you.

Unfussy Eater

Striped mackerel

Most animals are relatively picky, preferring only plants or only meat, and tend to rely on one strategy when foraging or hunting.

Mackerel are unusual in that they use two different feeding methods, filter feeding and particulate feeding, and switch between them opportunistically as needed. Particulate feeding involves capturing each prey item individually, like sharks and penguins.

Filter feeding is the way bivalves and baleen whales eat, and requires scraping bits of food out of the water. Mackerel uses the underside of its gills. The gills have overlapping bone hooks called gill akirs.
As a makeshift sieve to catch prey suspended in the water.

All fish have gill rakers, and variations in their appearance are sometimes used to identify species. When the prey is small and numerous, such as in a swarm of plankton, filter feeding can yield more food with minimal effort.

For large prey or sparse prey, it is better to feed with particulate bait. Even when surrounded by thousands of other fish in schools, mackerel keep their bellies full by not being too picky about how they eat.

Rapid Inflation

Gulper eel

Food is scarce in the deep sea, so the animals living there must cherish every meal. Few animals take this as seriously as the gulper eel. Gulper eels are also known as pelican eels because they share similar characteristics with birds.

Gulper eels have huge, loosely hinged mouths that are about a quarter of their body length. Their mouths are paper-thin, fragile, and unwieldy, so they hide their mouths when not feeding. Gulper eels have long, whip-like tails, but they are not fast enough to chase prey.

Instead, they float and wait, camouflaged in the darkness of the deep ocean. When a school of crustaceans or squid approaches, the eel lunges forward, quickly opening its origami mouth and swallowing large amounts of water.

After the attack, the eel’s mouth becomes fully inflated, making it look silly, like a candy or a balloon. It then slowly pushes excess water out of its gills before swallowing its unlucky prey.
We are obsessed with this distinctive feature.

Bottom Feeder

Sea urchin

The mouth of a sea urchin is on the underside, which is probably the least unusual way to eat a sea urchin.
The interior of a sea urchin is a complex pyramid-shaped structure made of hard calcareous calcium carbonate.
Substances also found in corals.

The pyramid is made up of triangular plates, each with a hook-shaped tooth at the end. Like the crane machines found in old arcades, the pyramid can move up and down and tilt. You can also move each plate to scrape, grab, dig, and even smash rocks.

The individual plates are ground while sliding against each other, so they are ready for cutting at any time. The entire device is precisely controlled by a network of wire-like muscles. With the help of powerful jaws, sea urchins greedily eat food. A single colony of these spiny starfish relatives can destroy an entire kelp forest by chewing through rocks and uprooting seaweed.

The sea urchin’s biological claw machine, properly called Aristotle’s lantern, is so unique that it has inspired engineers to design new machines to scoop up soil samples on Mars.

The Ultimate Underbite

Cookie cutter shark

Back in the 1970s, several U.S. Navy submarines returned from missions with damaged sonar equipment. Initial fears about the enemy’s new weapon disappear when the culprit turns out to be a cookie-cutter shark.

Cookie-cutter sharks, as their name suggests, leave perfectly round cuts in large fish and marine mammals (as well as the rubber covers of submarine sonar domes). These parasites make a living by stealth and deception, floating underwater until something big and tasty approaches.

They sneak up on you and hug you with their thick, fleshy sucker lips. The shark locks itself in place.
It digs in with its thin upper teeth and cuts through the flesh with the razor-sharp teeth of its lower jaw. Twisting and turning, they move their mandibles back and forth like a bandsaw, cutting out perfectly round discs of flesh before sneaking back into the dark depths of the ocean.

Cookie-cutter sharks are harmless to humans and merely a pest to their larger prey, but they occasionally cause nuisance to marine activities, damaging unprotected equipment and communication cables.

Monster Mouth

Lamprey

Several Hollywood creatures, including the sandworm Dune, the kraken Pirates of the Caribbean, and from the Sarlacc Return of the Jedi, a stylized version of a lamprey’s mouth. There’s something deeply unsettling about the concentric rings of sharp teeth that reach deep into the black depths of a monster’s throat.

In reality, lampreys are evolutionarily ancient animals that separated from other vertebrates more than 500 million years ago, before jaws and bones evolved. Lampreys can latch on to large fish, whales, and even sharks using a combination of suction and hooks made of keratin (a protein that claws are made of).

Lampreys spend several days using their sharp, piston-like, rough tongues to burrow into the flesh of their prey and suck in its blood and body fluids. Lampreys’ frightening appearance and unpleasant lifestyle have given them a bad reputation.

In fact, lamprey larvae are important members of the ecosystem, filtering river water and sediment like bivalves, and are also an important food source for benthic predators such as sturgeon.

A Large Plate of Food

Humpback whale

Humpback whales only eat between spring and fall, when they vacation in the Arctic and Antarctic waters where prey is abundant. With stomachs to fill and time limited, they rely on a creative strategy known as “bubble net hunting” to get the job done.

Humpback whales often travel in groups, diving beneath their prey and then slowly rising to the surface in a spiraling motion while blowing bubbles. The bubbles scare and confuse small fish called krill and crustacean prey like shrimp.

With the help of long fins, the whale rotates more and more tightly, concentrating future prey in dense masses near the water surface. Eventually, they take turns lunging forward, opening their mouths and punching through the solidified prey, swallowing tens of thousands of liters in one gulp.

Whales force water through their mouths, filtering it through sieve-like baleen plates on the roof of their mouths. Fish and krill are trapped inside strong, flexible hairs, ready to be swallowed whole by hunters.

Sawtooth Throat

Leatherback turtle

Leatherback turtles spend most of their lives in the open ocean, tracking prey into deep water during the day and shallow water at night. They are always on the lookout for jellyfish, their favorite food, but will also eat other soft snacks, such as squid and small crustaceans.

Leatherbacks act like natural pest control, controlling jellyfish populations and protecting juvenile fish and beaches from nuisance swarms, as each leatherback turtle eats hundreds of kilograms of jellyfish per day.

Jellyfish are squishy, so they can be difficult to track down, especially if they don’t have teeth or claws. Leatherback turtles use their delicate, scissor-like jaws to cut jellyfish into easily digestible pieces. Additionally, the leatherback’s throat is lined with backward-pointing spines that prevent slippery prey from escaping once captured (jellyfish can survive being cut in half, after all).

Leatherbacks can also eat poisonous organisms such as jellyfish, so the spines likely provide some protection from the stinging cells of their prey.

Nutcracker

Paku fish

Yes, cheese! The pakuu fish has many flat, square teeth in its mouth, giving it a human-like smile. Pakuu fish, also known as “vegetarian piranhas” because of their body shape and color, prefer freshwater “trail mix” rather than raw meat.

Their molar-shaped teeth do an excellent job of crushing the hard shells of nuts and seeds that irritate other animals, and provide a reliable source of fat and protein despite their plant-based diet. To do. Paku fish are the gardeners of the Amazon, playing an important ecological role in dispersing seeds across river tributaries and floodplains.

The most famous of Pacu’s fish, the tambaqui, can grow to the size of a golden retriever. At 1 meter (3 ft) long and 30 kg (66 lb), it is the second largest fish in the Amazon after the arapaima.

Tambaqui is a popular food in South America and is often sold in bone-in cuts like pork ribs. They also appear on the exotic pet market, but they require experienced keepers and really huge aquariums to thrive.

Cat Got Your Tongue?

Penguin

Penguins are agile underwater predators, flying around like torpedoes while chasing fish.
And squid. But how do they keep their prey from squirming and escaping their grasp?what is the answer
The birds are already in the mouth.

A penguin’s mouth and tongue are covered with hard, backward-facing spines called papillae. This is the same function that makes a cat’s tongue feel like sandpaper. However, you don’t want to be licked by a penguin. Not only are the spines large, but they are also sharp (they bleed easily if you lick them).

The spines help bite into slippery prey and transport it to the bird’s throat. A penguin’s tongue is also very muscular, so it’s probably used to push and manipulate food into its mouth, just like in humans. However, unlike us, penguins do not have the genes to detect sweet, bitter, and umami (umami) tastes, so they cannot taste the fish they eat.

Scientists think penguins lost their sense of taste because they didn’t use their senses. Not only do penguins swallow their food whole, but the proteins needed to send taste signals to their brains malfunction in cold temperatures.