7

The Shrimp That Eats Eyes

Eyeless, limbless and wormlike, the Ommatokoita is a crustacean, related to lobsters and shrimp, though we're pretty sure it doesn't taste as good with warm butter. Most of its cousins actually work for a living, scavenging the ocean floor, but Ommatokoita is the lazy bum of the crustacean world, as it craves only one horrible, horrible thing.

Om nom.

Ommatokoita feeds off the eyeballs of the Greenland shark, a shark so badass it will eat a goddamned polar bear. The parasite burrows itself into the shark's eye and then just anchors itself there, drinking delicious eye-jelly. It sits there, eating eyeball, for the rest of its life. Just more proof that the ocean is literally made of horror.

Luckily for the Greenland shark, it doesn't actually need eyes to hunt -- it's just that badass. Extra lucky, because almost all Greenland sharks have hell-shrimp in their eyes. Some scientists have postulated that the parasites may attract prey to the shark like symbiotic fishing lures. That's right -- the shark finds itself in a situation where bugs are eating its eyeballs forever and manages to benefit from it.

"Excellent. Sea monsters are eating my eye ... all goes according to plan."

6

Skuas Eat Terror Vomit

5

Caecilians Eat Their Mothers' Skin

4

Dracula Ants Are Worse Than Vampires ...

Your typical colony of ants is literally one big, happy family. Unless, of course, we're dealing with the Madagascan genus Adetomyrma, who in any other country would have insect social services busting down their doors. They would be like, ladybugs or something, with little warrants written on buttercup petals.

Members of Adetomyrma are also known as Dracula ants and have been called a "missing link" between ants and their close cousins, the wasps. To other insects, this is like being chased by the missing link between wolves and grizzly bears. You can already tell this only gets more horrible.

Via Alex Wild
Really? Things don't move up from "eyeless yellow demon"?

3

... And So Is the Vampire Finch

Getting stranded on a deserted island can lead to some pretty desperate behavior. Grown men talk to volleyballs, children worship dead pigs, and cute little Tweetie birds mutate into demonic ghouls.

And the worst version of Hamlet ever filmed.

On four of the Galapagos islands, the sharp-beaked ground finch leads a fairly normal little birdy life of eating bugs all day, but on the two barren, rocky islands of Darwin and Wolf, the same finches have diverged into a ghastly subspecies nicknamed the vampire finch, which wields razor-sharp peckers to feast on boobies (we're still talking about birds).

Via eversostrange.com

2

Beetles That Eat Unborn Snakes

The life of a burying beetle is just marginally more romantic than that of those beetles that eat only poop. A freshly mated pair of burying beetles will actually bury an entire tiny animal corpse underground in one night, and the female spends the rest of her life chewing up rotten meat for her larvae. It's pretty goth, though one species has decided that it wasn't nearly creepy enough.

Photo by Eco Heathen

1

Osedax Worms Eat Whale Bones (From the Inside)

In case you haven't heard, whales are big. The carcass of a whale weighs over 200 tons and takes months or even years to completely decompose. In the perpetual, freezing blackness of the deep sea abyss, a whale dying is like a zeppelin full of Big Macs crashing over Ethiopia. Entire ecosystems have evolved for the singular purpose of making sure no part of that whale goes to waste, not even its bones.

You might even call it a whale of a feast.

Forming over a whale corpse into what looks like pink fuzz are the countless tentacles of Osedax mucofloris, a relative of worms and leeches whose Latin name translates as "bone-eating snot-flower." We're not kidding.

Their microscopic eggs drift like spores in the deep ocean, lying dormant until the day they bump into recently exposed whale bone. On contact with the gigantic skeleton, they take root like plants, drilling into the bone with a network of fleshy tendrils.

Photo by Osedax Frankpressi
"You say fleshy tendrils like they're a bad thing."

Completely lacking mouths or digestive tracts, the worms depend on symbiotic bacteria to break down the fatty oils contained within bone, so technically, they don't so much eat bone as eat the poop of something inside of them that eats bone. That's right: Nature found a way to make the bone-eating process even more disturbing.

You impressed us once again, Nature.

For more species that need to be eradicated immediately, check out 6 Animals Humanity Accidentally Made Way Scarier and 13 Real Animals Lifted Directly Out of Your Nightmares.

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