The lamprey: more teeth than Dracula. (©iStockphoto.com/pedre)

It’s not hard to think of real animals that feed on blood. It’s not even hard if you narrow it down to ones we’ve written about. Mosquitoes. Fleas. Ticks. Bats. Bed bugs. The one big-name bloodsucker that hasn’t gotten the full HowStuffWorks.com treatment yet is the leech, so I’m putting that on the list of things to do.

But there are plenty of vampire creatures that haven’t spent much time in the limelight. Here are some of my favorites — and the B-grade horror movies they could star in.

“Grosse Pointe Bug”: Assassin bugs, aka kissing bugs, live in Central and South America and the American Southwest. They come out at night, track sleeping victims by following their exhaled carbon dioxide, and draw blood from the lips, eyelids or ears. They can also leave their waste in the wound, leading to a parasitic infection called Chagas disease. Don’t let that creep you out while you’re trying to get to sleep tonight, though.

“Jawsless!”: Vampires live underwater, too. Lampreys are jawless fish that live in fresh or salt water. Adults have round, toothy mouths they use to latch on to other fish and drain their blood. If enough lampreys gang up on a fish, they can kill it.

“The Varroa Ate My Baby”: You’re safe from vampiric varroa mites unless you’re a baby bee. These tiny arachnids break into bee hives, where they feed on the blood — or, more accurately, the hemolymph — of the developing larvae. They can wipe out a whole colony if they go unchecked, and bees that survive the attacks often emerge missing wings or legs.

“The Plant That Ate the Plant That Ate the South”: Trees don’t even have blood, but they have their own vampires: dodder. These orange vines don’t need light to live — they don’t use photosynthesis or even have any chlorophyll — but they grow well in full sun. Dodder vines move around, looking for a plant host, and once they find one, they wrap around it and use suckers to feed off the plant’s fluids. They ditch their roots entirely, living solely off of their host. There’s even a species that feeds on kudzu.

This marsh dodder is terrorizing the plants of San Francisco Bay! (Photo by Jeff Foott/Copyright Discovery Communications, LLC)

How does dodder find plants to feed off of? It smells them. Here’s a time-lapse video of a baby one getting ready to chow down on a tomato.

More on the world of vampires at HowStuffWorks.com:
How Vampires Work
How Bats Work
Who was the real Count Dracula?