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.
Water rail
Parasites include the sucking lice "Nirmus cuspidiculus" and "Pediculus ralli", the tick "Ixodes frontalis", and the louse fly "Ornithomyia avicularia". The water rail can be infected by the avian influenza virus and the bacterium "Borrelia burgdorferi", carried by "Ixodes" ticks, which is also a human pathogen causing Lyme disease. Three lice, "Fulicoffula rallina", "Pseudomenopon scopulacorne" and "Rallicola cuspidatus" discovered on dead water rails in 2005 on the Faroe Islands were all species that had not been found on the archipelago previously. The parasitic flatworm "Ophthalmophagus nasciola" was found in one rail's nasal sinus, and at least three species of feather mite have been detected on the plumage. The louse "Philopterus ralli" and the nematode "Strongyloides avium" have been found on the closely related brown-cheeked rail "R. a. indicus".