In April 2025, a popular video posted to Reddit (archived) showed a number of moths — camouflaged too look like the end of a twig — perched on a person's hand. The footage was originally shared on Instagram (archived).
A similar video shared to Reddit in July 2021 also showed one of the seemingly surreal insects on someone's finger.
To determine whether the video accurately depicted a real animal, Snopes spoke in 2021 with Sangmi Lee, an entomologist and professor at Arizona State University. Lee said that the video appeared to be authentic, and the moth featured in it looked like a moth in the genus Phalera and the family Notodontidae.
"There is a well-known species Phalera bucelphala found in Europe and Asia, looking like a broken birch twig," Lee said.
Fittingly nicknamed the "buff-tip" moth, this 2-inch insect holds its wings vertically against its body when at rest to blend into the pale wood of deciduous trees common in its home range.
Butterfly Conservation, a U.K.-based conservation group, notes that the insect feeds on birch, oak and hazel trees. Adults can be found resting in the day on a twig or on the ground before coming to flight at night, usually after midnight from June through July. An early-20th century reference work (Page 312) found that they range across most of Europe, northeast Africa and Asia.
