Photos Reveal Moths Sipping Tears from a Moose

In a first, photos show moths sipping on moose’s tears

By Gennaro Tomma edited by Andrea Thompson

When animals cry, butterflies start licking their lips.

Butterflies’ less glamorous relatives are known for using their long proboscis to sip tears from everything from birds to reptiles to pets. But this behavior, known as larphagia, has mainly been observed in the tropics.

Now, for the first time, researchers have documented moths drinking the tears of a moose – only the second time this 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 at the Vermont Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at the University of Vermont, discovered the sighting by chance while browsing trail camera footage from Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest for an unrelated project. “It almost looked like the moose had two [additional] eyes,” he said. “At first I wasn’t sure what it was.”

Only after scrolling through the sequence of images did he realize he was watching moths drinking the tears of a bull moose. “I had looked at a lot of trail camera footage. I had never seen anything like this before,” he says. The results were recently published in Ecosphere. A colleague recently filmed another case of moths drinking the tears of a moose in Vermont.

Moths – and some other insects, like bees – are thought to feed on the tears of other animals to obtain minerals and other nutrients.

The paucity of documentation outside the tropics might simply be because “few 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 could be more worrying. “The number of butterfly species and individual species abundance are declining quite significantly in many places,” says Kawahara, who was not involved in the new research. “So it’s also possible that we won’t see many more of them because there aren’t many left.”

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