Moles and their subterranean lifestyle

It's hard to imagine having a lifestyle that involves constantly digging in dark tunnels and eating worms, unless you are a mole. Then it's normal. But moles are such unique creatures that if one was described to you without you knowing it's a small animal that lives nearby, you might think it was a extraterrestrial being out of a sci fi movie.

For example, not only do they eat earthworms, they actually have poison saliva that paralyzes the earthworms so they can store them alive?! and eat them later. That's quite an adaption but you can see how it would be an advantage. Afterall, you never know when you might come across a bonanza of earthworms or go a day without finding one.

Where do they keep these unfortunate earthworms until ready to eat them? They store them in a larder. Larders have been found that contain a thousand earthworms.

And then there's that living under the ground thing. Wouldn't you have trouble breathing, especially when you are busy digging and catching worms? Turns out, a mole has the ability to live in high concentrations of carbon dioxide. Its red blood cells carry a special kind of hemoglobin that enables a mole to rebreathe its own expired air. (source BMC Evolutionary Biology journal)

(Photo above from Wikipedia)

Then there is the star-nosed mole. It lives up north, in Canada. It has 22 tentacles sticking out from its nose. That surface area is constantly touching its surroundings in the dark. If identifies anything as edible, it eats it. Not only does it eat it, it eats it faster than the human eye can follow. We must use special high speed cameras just to see it. Timing the moles' actions, researchers at Vanderbilt University found that after touching a small piece of food they took an average of 230 milliseconds to identify it as edible and eat it. That's only one-fifth of a second. It's the only animal other than fish that can eat that fast. (source, journal Nature) See a video: Here