Have you ever pretended your butt was your face in order to avoid being eaten?

No? Well, that’s the primary survival strategy for the spectacular Hairstreak Butterfly.

I’d never heard of this amazing creature until I spotted it on a leaf during a recent camping trip in the Peruvian Amazon, and I won’t lie – it had me completely dumbfounded. I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to work out what on Earth I was looking at.

Hairstreak Butterflies are renowned for their impressive automimicry, which is science for ‘pretending to be yourself’. Automimicry is a technique employed by a variety of animals – including some snakes and fishes – and it typically involves making a less vulnerable part of yourself look like a more vulnerable part of yourself in order to distract predators.

In the Hairstreak Butterflies, the ends of their wings have evolved long, thin filaments that resemble their own antennae. And even more impressively, when perched on a leaf, these butterflies will constantly rub their wings together in order to make the filaments move like antennae as well!

Butterflies don’t live very long, and surviving just a single attack from a bird or a spider could be the difference between whether or not an individual gets the chance to reproduce. The evolutionary objective is that if a predator does decide to take a bite out of a Hairstreak Butterfly, it will be left with nothing but a mouthful of wing, while the butterfly’s real head gets to live another day.

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Hairstreak Butterfly (Arawacus separata), Manu Biological Station, Peru