• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Watch Butterflies In The Amazon Drinking Turtle Tears

July 28, 2023 by Deborah Bloomfield

If you are ever lucky enough to travel down the Peruvian Amazon, you may see a rather magical sight. Amongst all the incredible animal species that the area is home to, butterflies have been filmed doing something rather incredible: drinking the tears of the turtles that live there.

Tropical entomologist and science communicator Phil Torres posted a video to his YouTube channel showing the remarkable behavior of these butterfly species. He explains that the butterflies, around eight different species, are all seeking one thing: sodium. 

Advertisement

This area is lacking in salt because of the distance from the open sea. The Atlantic Ocean is more than 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) away, and the Andes Mountains are blocking the wind from carrying important mineral particles to this region. This causes the animals that live here to get a bit creative to find salt.

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

Typically butterflies feast on the nectar of flowers, slurping up the sugary goodness with their long proboscis. These insects also need salt, and while they can’t get it from plants, poop, mud, and turtle tears provide them with a good source. This is likely because the diet of the turtles contains meat and therefore a higher salt content. The turtles don’t seem to get much out of the experience, however. 

Advertisement

“They definitely don’t seem to enjoy it,” Peter told LiveScience in 2018. “This is a fairly colorful example of commensalism — a species partnership where one species benefits and the other species doesn’t really get affected, positively or negatively.”

Butterflies aren’t the only animal to seek an unusual source to get the salt content they need – the Kitum cave elephants are known to mine dirt from these caves to access calcium, magnesium, and sodium. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. El Salvador buys its first 200 bitcoins, president says
  2. Biden administration to move public lands agency back to Washington from Colorado
  3. Creators of molecule-building precision tools win Chemistry Nobel
  4. Lake Vs Pond: Do You Know The Difference?

Source Link: Watch Butterflies In The Amazon Drinking Turtle Tears

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Why Don’t Polar Bears Hibernate?
  • Anyone Born After 1939 Is Unlikely To Live To 100
  • Are Space-Made Medicines The Future? Find Out More In Issue 38 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • An Alien-Like Fish With A See-Through Head And Green Eyes Lurks In The Ocean’s Dark Depths
  • Africa Wants To Change Misleading World Map, The “Wow!” Signal Was Likely From An Extraterrestrial Source, And Much More This Week
  • A “Good Death”: How Do Doctors Want To Die?
  • People Are Throwing Baby Puffins Off Cliffs In Iceland Again – But Why?
  • Yet Another Ancient Human Skull Turns Out To Be Denisovan
  • Gen Z Might Not Be On Course For A Midlife Crisis – Good News, Right? Wrong
  • Glowing Plants, Punk Ankylosaur, And Has The Wow! Signal Been Solved?
  • Pulsar Fleeing A Supernova Spotted Where Neither Of Them Should Be
  • 20 Years After Hurricane Katrina: Is It Time For A New Approach To Hurricane Classification?
  • Dog Named Scribble Replicates Quantum Factorization Records – So We Tried It Too
  • How Old Is The Solar System? (And How Can We Tell?)
  • Next Week, A Record-Breaking Over 7 Billion People Will See The Total Lunar Eclipse
  • The Goblin Shark Has The Fastest Jaws In The Ocean, Firing Like A Slingshot At Speeds Of 3.1-Meters-Per-Second
  • We Thought Geological Boundaries Were Random. Now, A New Study Has Identified Hidden Patterns
  • Do Fish Sleep?
  • The Biblical Flood Myth That Inspired Noah’s Ark Had A Sinister Twist
  • Massive Review Of 19 Autism Therapies Finds No Strong Evidence And Lack Of Safety Data
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version