And the award for fanciest butt in the animal kingdom goes to…

Baby planthoppers are ridiculous and I think they know it. Look at the side-eye in this photo. It definitely wants you to check out its butt and it’s not being subtle about it. So what’s going on here?

Planthoppers are an often-underappreciated type of insect that spend their lives hopping around on plants (go figure). There’s more than 12,000 species of planthopper worldwide, and they can be found on every continent except Antarctica.

Often only a few millimetres in size, they can be tricky to spot, but the reward for spotting one can sometimes be an extravagant butt, and who doesn’t want that?

Planthopper nymphs of certain species create these amazing structures as a result of their diet. They typically feed on plant sap, which is relatively low in nutrients, so the planthoppers have to filter out much of the sticky sap in order to access enough of the good stuff.

While some planthoppers will just shoot the excess sap as far away as possible, others get a little more creative. They excrete a kind of wax which hardens into the long tufts you see here, allowing the sap to drain away without getting stuck to their body (like a chain you might attach to the end of a gutter).

It’s also been theorised that the waxy structures allow the planthopper nymphs to make a quick escape if they happen to be munched on by something, or even that they have evolved to mimic potentially dangerous fungi (such as the ‘zombie fungus’ Ophiocordyceps) in order to dissuade potential predators.

Whatever its purpose, it is undoubtedly a truly majestic butt.

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Planthopper Nymph (Nogodinidae), Osa Peninsula, Costa Rica