Deep in the Amazon jungle, ecologist Leandro Moraes filmed a moth sucking the tears out of a sleeping antbird’s eye.
The delicately-performed nighttime feeding is a rarely seen event, wrote Moraes in a report about the experience, entitled “Please, more tears: a case of a moth feeding on antbird tears in central Amazonia.”
The short clip depicts a moth carefully dipping its tubular mouth into the bird’s closed eye. For a brief moment, the antbird opens its eye, but doesn’t seem to notice the large insect perched on its back — nor the tube resting in its eyeball.
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Consuming the tears of other animals is called lachryphagy, and has previously been witnessed in bees and butterflies consuming the tears of formidable predators: crocodiles.
Stealthily sucking another animal’s tears is apparently a risk worth taking. In an intensely-competitive natural world, tears are a rich source of salts and nutrients. Sleep carefully.
