Moths Love Lamps … and sipping the salty tears of sleeping birds | Smart News

During a search expedition into a forest along the Solimões River, in the center of the Amazon, a researcher came across a scene both fairy, horror film and just plain strange . In the middle of the night, ecologist Leandro Moraes contemplated a butterfly perched on the neck of a sleeping black-chinned bird.

With his proboscis extended, the creature with dusty wings gently pulled the tears of the sleeping bird. Forty-five minutes later, he met another butterfly feasting on the tears of another bird, reports Richa Malhotra at Science. Fortunately for us, Moraes was also able to capture images of the late-night snack.

It is not surprising that ringworm drinks bird tears. Lepidoptera, the family of insects, including butterflies and butterflies, are well known for flocking to animal secretions to get a dose of salt. The creatures are fond of salt mud, puddles of urine, rotting flesh, sweat, tears, blood and poo, if you name it. In fact, Brandon Specktor at LiveScience points out that the phenomenon is so common in biology that it bears a name, lachryphagia.

Sandrine Ceurstemont in National Geographic reports that butterflies and bees have been reported drink tears of crocodiles from caiman, solitary bees were recorded drinking tears of turtles in Ecuador and a moth, Gorgon Macarea, in Colombia was documented in 2015 drinking the tears of a banded kingfisher, another species of bird. Many species of bees and flies are also known to suck ocular secretions from different animals in the tropical areas of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

And the number of new species in love with tears is increasing. Michael Engel, from the University of Kansas, who studied the phenomenon but did not participate in this study, told Ceurstemont that lachryphage has rarely been reported in the Amazon.

"The new discovery is helping to expand an interesting biogeographic region where tear feeding should be diversified and yet little known," he says.

But it is rare to drink the tears of sleepy birds and the new study of Moraes in the newspaper Ecology is only the third scientific account of the greedy bird tear, reports Specktor for LiveScience. The phenomenon is something mysterious, says Moraes in Ceurstemont. This is because the area where the interaction was filmed is often flooded, bringing a lot of salt into the mud that butterflies and butterflies can access.

This makes it possible that the ringworm is not after the salt in the tears of the bird but something else. Moraes, who is conducting research at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Manaus, Brazil, said he was probably looking for protein.

Other researchers have hypothesized the same thing, finding that tears have 200 times the protein of other secretions like sweat. Researchers have found that other species of Lachryphages, especially bees, do not obtain pollen or carrion proteins, unlike other species, and instead use tears for the important nutrient. Ringworm may do the same thing, or at least supplement the diet with bird tears.

Anyway, since butterflies seem to be the Gothic hero of the Internet right now, this discovery undoubtedly broadens their credibility beyond their relentless reliance on to have an ironic moment in the spotlight.

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