Mouths, snouts and beaks: The most bizzare mouths in the animal world

The sword-billed hummingbird’s beak is longer than its body. It has the longest beak of all known hummingbird species. And it needs it! One of the bird's main sources of food is nectar, which it drinks from very long, slender hanging flower crowns. With its beak wide open, it can also catch insects.

Two star-like shapes on its snout make the star-nosed mole a very well-equipped hunter. The appendages around its nostrils — a total of 22 fleshy tentacles — are sensory organs. With these it can examine 13 potential prey animals per second. We can't even look that fast!

An egg-laying mammal with a beaver‘s tail and a duck‘s beak. What sounds like a fantasy creature actually exists — in Australia. The platypus boasts a large, flexible beak with a leather-like surface. A built-in snorkel is also included: its nostrils are on top. This allows the animal to dive underwater and breathe at the same time.

Don't worry, as scary as it may appear, this vampire is vegetarian. The tufted deer prefers to graze at dusk. If it senses danger, it does something unusual: it barks. Deer do this to warn each other. While fleeing, they erect their white tail — an escape-signal among tufted deer.

This bird may look like a character from a comic, but the shoebill actually walks among us — in the swamps of central tropical Africa. It often stands motionless in the water and looks downward. When it detects prey, it strikes at lightning speed. With the hook at the top of its beak, it grabs its prey. Even large lungfishes are swallowed up whole.

With a body length of up to 10 meters, the basking shark is the second-largest fish in the world, after the whale shark. Despite its monstrous size, it's anything but bloodthirsty; basking sharks eat just one thing: plankton. They swim with their mouths wide open to catch and filter food. Water that enters its mouth with the plankton is filtered out through its gills — 1800 tons of water per hour.

Gavials live in Southeast Asia. In contrast to the crocodile, gavials don't eat zebras or deer, but fish. Its snout is therefore long, narrow and home to very many teeth. Perfect for catching fish!

The sucking trunk of the hummingbird hawk-moth is not only very long, it's also extremely precise. The butterfly can suck nectar from up to 100 flowers per minute. While doing so, the moth hovers in front of the flower. With its long trunk, the hummingbird hawk-moth can also reach the nectar of flowers with particularly long calyxes — out of reach for others.

The spoonbill is equipped with the perfect tool. No matter fish, frog or other water-dweller, nothing escapes this beak. In searching for food. the spoonbill usually goes into shallow water. However, sometimes it also wanders the coast. In the mud flats, it swings its head back and forth, filtering food from the shallow water.

Dugongs feed on seaweed. They prefer the part of the plants that lay underground. And they have developed a special technique for this: this manatee can dig. It digs out the plant with its upper lip, then the roots are pulled out of the ground. It shakes off the dirt and then sucks the plant into its mouth.