Fluid nutrition is a mode of nutrition used by organisms, including filter feeding, depot feeding, bulk feeding, phagocytosis, and fluid feeding. Animals that practice fluid feeding include hummingbirds, spiders, aphids, vampire bats, ticks, mosquitoes, and leeches. Fluid feeders need a way to puncture the protective wall and suck out all the fluids. Hummingbirds are fluid feeders of flowers, while ticks and mosquitoes are bloodsuckers that spread diseases.
Fluid nutrition is one of the five main modes of nutrition used by organisms. The others are filter feeding, depot feeding, bulk feeding and phagocytosis.
Fluid feeding is defined as obtaining nutrients by consuming another body’s fluids. Animals that practice fluid feeding include hummingbirds, spiders, aphids, vampire bats, ticks, mosquitoes, and leeches. Except for the hummingbirds, this is truly a gallery of reviled organisms.
Many fluid feeders rightfully have a bad reputation. While the “fluid” in question may be botanical in origin, when it comes to animals, the fluid is blood. So many who feed on fluids are bloodsuckers. But fluid feeding is obviously a successful mode, and it has probably been around since insects first crawled onto land about 428 million years ago, during the Devonian period.
Fluid feeders need a way to puncture the protective wall (skin or plant walls) getting in the way of fluid, then a proboscis-like appendage to suck out all the fluids. Aphids specialize in doing this to plants, which is why they can be found in such numbers on some plants, especially those that produce an abundance of sweet fluid.
Hummingbirds, the smallest bird with the highest metabolism, are fluid feeders of flowers. Hummingbirds are an extraordinary animal: they are the only bird capable of flying backwards and controlling vertical and lateral movement with such precision. Their long beaks are used to drink nectar from flowers, an excellent example of fluid feeding. Hummingbirds flap their wings between 15 and 80 times per second, and their metabolism is so fast that they are hours away from starving at any given moment.
The most despised fluid feeders are those who feed on human blood, spreading infections and some of the worst diseases. Pliny the Elder defined bloodsucking ticks as “the dirtiest and meanest creatures there are”. They spread various diseases, including Lyme disease, which can be fatal if left untreated. Mosquitoes annoy us with their buzzing and spread malaria, which afflicts half a billion people every year and kills one to three million.
While fluid feeding is not a particularly common feeding method, we see that animals using this feeding mode have a diverse range, from the naughty to the beautiful.
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