It's been a week since our last round. The "feline" answer was "water tiger" - as MW suggested, a larval form of pond life better known in its adult manifestation as a predaceous diving beetle:
It looks somewhat like a shrimp, with a head borrowed from somebody's nightmare. The sickle-shaped, hollow jaws clutch their prey and funnel flesh-digesting drool into the victim until the water tiger literally sucks it dry. It can eat 20 tadpoles a day.For this next round we'll stay in the water and ask for the - surprise - "avian" name for this creature (and I use the quotation marks advisedly), because it's the name, as well as the lifestyle, that is most interesting.
Gooey Duck?
ReplyDeleteSomething similar was on discovery channels "Dirty Jobs" podcast.
Euwwwk - it's *alive*? How worrying.
ReplyDeleteUm, at first I thought it might be the mouth of a carp - but on looking closer I think not.
Perhaps it's one of those semi-mobile plants like the cunjevoi - their free-swimming larvae have a notochord (precursor of vertebrae), a dorsal nerve chord, and gill slits. So they're kind of like an animal. A bit. Am I remotely close?