For animals like us, eating seems pretty simple: You bite the food directly, or you use arms to shovel it in. But that's far from the only way to do it. Across the animal kingdom there are numerous creative ways to ingest food and drink--some gross, some conniving, and some wonderfully weird. These are a few of our favorites.

Polychaeta are a class of worms that are commonly called bristle worms because of the many bristles that help them move around. But they also have a bizarre way of ingesting: an axial proboscis (pictured at right) that researchers liken to a retractable elephant trunk. It's actually inside the worm's body, and after the worm deploys it to catch food it flexes muscles that retract it.