Hi, so I just saw a video of a little bird eating a bee. And it made wonder: How does the bee being at least a bit alive (and angry!) while swallowing not hurt the birds when eating? I feel the same way about other animals who tend to swallow their prey whole e.g. predatory fish, owl who swallow mice and so on. I imagine it would hurt a lot to have an angry animal thrashing with all their might from within. 🙁
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Lots do! Animals frequently die from trying to eat something they shouldn’t have.
I’ve had pet lizards and you never want to feed them anything bigger than the space between their eyes, otherwise they might not be able to pass it through their digestive system and could die.
Sometimes a fish eats another fish that’s covered in spines and they both die.
Sometimes a snake is hurt or even killed by its intended prey before eating it, sometimes they die choking on it.
Nature isn’t perfect and lots of predators die hunting, it’s high risk behavior. But as long as enough of the hunters are successful enough to breed, it doesn’t matter. The species will go on. And if the ones who survive have traits that helped, like a thick stomach lining, that could be passed down to their kids, making them better hunters.
Many do, honestly. Eating live prey is a dangerous way to eat.
That said, most live prey dies quite fast once it’s inside another animal. There is no breathable air in most animals’ digestive systems, so you go in with only as much oxygen as you brought with you. They pass out quickly and die soon after.
The pray might indeed bite, claw, sting, etc. their predators. In general this is a risk that the predator is willing to take. The wounds it would get from the pray are less then the problems of not eating. This is why you sometimes see predators ignore what looks like easy pray, as they know that the pray might fight back and hurt them. So they tend to shy away from pray unless they are hungry.
it’s absolutely not uncommon for animals to die or be hurt from what they’re eating.
I remember hearing stories of naive snake owners thinking it was cheaper/easier to just feed local live rats rather than pet store frozen ones and in a few situations the rat basically killed the snake and ate it instead.
Guess animals have to learn the hard way…or else they’ll be dinner! Survival of the luckiest, I suppose. 🍽️
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