It's been a week since our last round. The "feline" answer was "water tiger" - as MW suggested, a larval form of pond life better known in its adult manifestation as a predaceous diving beetle:
It looks somewhat like a shrimp, with a head borrowed from somebody's nightmare. The sickle-shaped, hollow jaws clutch their prey and funnel flesh-digesting drool into the victim until the water tiger literally sucks it dry. It can eat 20 tadpoles a day.For this next round we'll stay in the water and ask for the - surprise - "avian" name for this creature (and I use the quotation marks advisedly), because it's the name, as well as the lifestyle, that is most interesting.
