How to Survive Being Swallowed by Another Animal
“An explosion was audible inside each toad.”

Finally, swallowed animals can sometimes turn the tables on their swallowers in truly dramatic fashion. Gil Wizen and Avital Gasith found one such example by studying Epomis beetles. These insects eat frogs, and nothing else. When a frog lashes out with its tongue, an Epomis larva will dodge. It then grabs its attacker’s face with a pair of hooked jaws, and slowly eats the poor frog alive. Over 400 such standoffs, Wizen and Gasith saw that the beetle always won. In one case, a toad actually managed to snag an Epomis larva and swallow it. Two hours later, it regurgitated the beetle, which then turned around and ate the animal that had just eaten it.