Eater 2 is an eater that was found by David Buckingham in the 1970s. Mostly it works like the standard eater (see eater 1) but with two slight differences that make it useful despite its size; it takes longer to recover from each bite and it acts like an eater in two directions. The first property means that, among other things, it can eat a glider in a position that would destroy an eater 1. This novel glider-eating action is occasionally of use in itself, and combined with the symmetry means that an eater 2 can eat gliders along four different paths.
An eater 2 variant noticed by Stephen Silver in May 1998 that is useful for obtaining smaller bounding boxes is shown below. Note that eater 2 is a strict still life because the outside cells are not stable without the block, but the eater 2 variant below is a pseudo still life because it is made up of an aircraft carrier, block and hat, each of which are stable.
