When animals cry, moths start licking their chops.
The less glamorous relatives of butterflies have been known to use their long proboscis to sip the tears of everything from birds to reptiles to even domestic animals. But the behavior, known as lachryphagy, has been mostly observed in the tropics.
Now, for the first time, researchers have documented moths drinking the tears of a moose—just the second time the behavior has been documented outside of the tropics. (The other was observed with a horse in Arkansas.)
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Laurence Clarfeld, a researcher in the Vermont Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Vermont, came across the sighting by chance while scrolling through trail camera images from the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont for an unrelated project. “It almost looked like the moose had two [additional] eyes,” he says. “At first, I wasn’t sure what it was.”
Only after skimming through the sequence of images did he realize he was looking at moths drinking the tears of a bull moose. “I’d looked at a lot of trail camera images. I’d never seen anything like that before,” he says. The findings were published recently in Ecosphere. A colleague recently filmed another instance of moths drinking a moose’s tears in Vermont.
Moths—and some other insects, such as bees—are thought to feed on other animals’ tears to get minerals and other nutrients.
The rarity of documentation outside of the tropics might simply be because “not a lot of scientists are looking in these places,” says entomologist Akito Kawahara, director of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
But the reason might be more concerning. “The number of moth species and individual abundance of species is declining pretty significantly in many places,” Kawahara, who was not involved in the new research, says. “So it’s also possible that we just don’t see many more because there aren’t that many anymore.”