Remarkable Footage of a Giant Moth Drinking the Tears of a Sleeping Antbird in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest

Brazilian researcher Leandro João Carneiro de Lima Moraes, a biologist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research who studies local rainforest wildlife, captured the remarkable sight of a giant moth drinking the tears of a sleeping antbird. While it’s a bit more common to see butterflies drinking from turtles’ tears, this interaction proved so rare that Moraes published a paper in the Ecological Society of America journal Ecology.

In what is perhaps the strangest update we’ve heard from ecologists in a while, a Brazilian researcher has documented – on video – a moth feeding on the tears of a sleeping bird.

It’s also interesting to note that while the moth was drinking the tears of the sleeping bird, a parasitic mosquito was happy to drink the bird’s blood for a while as well.