Drama, Sprays and Crawling Back Out: 3 Weird Ways Animals Avoid Being Lunch

Prey often finds itself woefully outmatched by a predator, but a few animals have found incredibly outlandish ways to cheat the Grim Reaper. Let's take a look at...

• Dramatically Feigning Death
• Appetite Suppressants, Vomit Sprays and Worse
• The Great Escape (From a Stomach)

Dramatically Feigning Death

One way to discourage a predator is to seem not only dead, but rotten. Many predators prefer live prey as carrion might be infected with all kinds of horrible microbes. As a result, some animals try to avoid being eaten by thanatosis - or in other words, feigning death.

Perhaps the most famous exemplars of thanatosis are the opossums. It's from these American marsupials that we get the term "playing possum" and they have the tactic down to a fine art. They often freeze when threatened, but if the situation seems hopeless, they'll fall prone, become immobile and go stiff. They'll stop responding to touches and pinches, dramatically reduce their heart rate (almost halving it) while breathing less frequently and slightly lowering their body temperature. They'll also simultaneously salivate, urinate and defecate to help sell the "stinking lump of carrion" impersonation.

Another less-well known (but arguably more dramatic) proponent of this tactic is the dice snake, especially a population of these non-venomous water-reptiles living on Golem Grad island in North Macedonia. The snakes respond to being grabbed by birds (and researchers) by twitching, writhing, going limp or stiff, covering themselves in musk or feces and in some cases, filling their mouths with blood. The elements of each performance vary between individual snakes, which suggests that the behavior isn't just instinct and may be (at least partially) learned!

Appetite Suppressants, Vomit Sprays and Worse

Feigning death is all well and good, but what about taking a more proactive approach?

Sea hares are a kind of marine mollusk. Some of them can grow quite large, and to a hungry lobster, they present a tempting meal. Sea hares are not defenseless however - like squid, some species can jet out sprays of ink... or the strange substance known as opaline.

Opaline is an interesting fluid. Researchers have found that it binds to the antennae, mouthparts and chemosensory appendages of lobsters - which in human terms means that it dulls the lobster's sense of smell and taste.

It's a simple but seemingly effective tactic. Researchers found that lobsters treated with opaline seemed to lose their appetite - and that they were much more interested in cleaning themselves than eating!

A much more unpleasant defense comes from the turkey vulture. Since it relies on a diet of rotting carrion, the vulture has very strong stomach acid that can kill some of the worst microbes the planet has to offer... but if threatened by an eagle or another predator, this acid can be repurposed into a vicious projectile vomit attack able to hit targets as far as 10ft away. This corrosiveness of this spray is comparable to battery acid and can burn the skin or eyes of an attacker, allowing the now-lightened vulture to beat a hasty retreat!

Rounding out this festival of foulness are the pygmy and dwarf sperm whales. Borrowing a trick from squid, these cetaceans carry a sac of red-brown liquid in their intestines that can be released if threatened. This billowing cloud can deter or blind predators while the whale uses echolocation to slip away. As a less than delightful side-note, full sized sperm whales have been known to use "defensive defecation" to create brown underwater clouds and fend off orca attacks!

The Great Escape (From a Stomach)

So let's say that any defensive tricks an animal has have failed, and it's found itself in the digestive tract of a predator - you'd think that would be game over, right? Well, that's actually not true for all animals.

The juvenile Japanese eel finds itself the prey of many piscivores, often resulting in it being stuffed head-first into the stomach of a predatory fish. This feisty little fellow doesn't give up easily though - researchers were able to use x-ray machines to watch the young eels poke their tails (which often didn't go all the way into the stomach) out of their would-be predator's gills, then slowly pull themselves out by coiling their body. It's no sure thing (and only 9 successful escapes occurred out of 32 swallowed eels) but that's still pretty amazing.

Of course, there's another route out of the stomach. Researchers investigating the tiny Japanese snail Tornatellides boeningi have discovered that these mollusks can sometimes survive a trip through the entire digestive tract of birds. Despite being fed to both white-eyes and brown-eared bulbuls, roughly 15% of the snails emerged alive from the resulting bird droppings. It's thought that the small size of their shells may have helped them avoid being cracked, while the mollusk could cover the entrance to their shell with mucous to avoid digestive juices. The researchers even suggested that this ability to survive passing through the birds (a process taking between thirty minutes and two hours) may have helped the snails spread across their island home in a similar way to plant seeds.

There's another example of creatures surviving being eaten, but in this case the "victim" is really a predator in disguise. Larvae of the Epomis beetles act like any other juicy grub, but it's all a ruse aimed at luring amphibians to gobble them up. The larvae usually manage to dodge the attempt, latch on and begin to feed on the amphibian... but sometimes they get it wrong and end up in the mouth or stomach of their prey. Each time, the amphibian ends up spitting (or regurgitating) the larvae back into the world... only for the larvae to eat them in turn!

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Sources and Further Info:

• Physiological responses associated with feigned death in the American opossum
• Dice Snakes Fake Their Own Deaths With Gory, Poop-Filled Theatrics
• STICKY SECRETIONS SAVE SEA HARES FROM PREDATORS
• Turkey Vulture: A bird that spits acid | AMAZING ANIMALS
• Pygmy Sperm Whale
• Sperm whales drop 'bubble of poo' off WA to prevent orca attack in rarely recorded encounter
• How Japanese eels escape from the stomach of a predatory fish
• Snails Survive Being Eaten by Birds—A Mystery
• Beetle larva lures and kills frogs, while the adult hunts and paralyses them