Water rail
Water rails are omnivorous, although they mainly feed on animals. These include leeches, worms, gastropods, small crustaceans, spiders, and a wide range of both terrestrial and aquatic insects and their larvae. Small vertebrates such as amphibians, fish, birds and mammals may be killed or eaten as carrion. Vertebrates are impaled with a strike of the bill which breaks the prey's spinal cord. Plant food, which is consumed more in autumn and winter, includes the buds, flowers, shoots and seeds of water plants, berries and fruit. In south Asia, paddy (harvested rice kernels) may sometimes be eaten. The young rails are fed mainly on insects and spiders. Food obtained on land or from mud is normally washed in water before it is eaten. After rain, rails may probe soft ground for earthworms. This species will occasionally feed in the open even when not forced to do so by cold weather; Edmund Meade-Waldo described seven rails feeding in an open meadow. Despite its skulking nature, the water rail appears to thrive in captivity when fed on animal food such as raw meat or earthworms; one individual was taught to jump for worms suspended from a fishing rod.
Mobile logperch
Juveniles eat organisms such as rotifers, copepods, and waterfleas. As they grow, they incorporate a greater variety of small aquatic creatures. They eat mostly aquatic insects (especially mayfly and midge larvae), and also may eat young snails, waterfleas, leeches, and fish eggs (including their own) when available. "Percina" show broad diversity of reproductive behavior and life history traits. Large numbers of reservoir-based individuals frequently migrate upstream into small flowing streams from late February into May to spawn (in Carrolls Creek, a tributary of Lake Tuscaloosa, Alabama). Females are thought to bury eggs in riffles or shoals of sand or gravel. Mobile logperch may live three to four years. They sometimes fall prey to piscivorous fish (more often in lakes than in streams). These fish include lake trout, walleye, rock bass, largemouth bass, burbot, and northern pike. When they spend time in slow and shallow water, they also are eaten by fish-eating birds, such as terns and mergansers.