Foreshock
IndexScience & EnvironmentNo. 49 emerging

Lachryphagy

Consumption of tears

+210%
vs its own baseline
+173%
year on year
+20.6%
per month, last 90 days
59
confidence / 100
Share of all English Wikipedia traffic · weekly 104 weeks to 2 Sep 2026 Normalised — sitewide swings removed

Why we think this is real

Six tests · all shown, pass or fail

The floor moved, not just the peak

Its quietest recent week still sits 66% above the old baseline. A news spike leaves the floor where it was.

1.66×

Not one event

Share of the last four months of extra attention that landed in its busiest seven days. High means a single story, not a trend.

54%

Not the calendar

How much of this topic's shape repeats every year. The annual cycle is estimated per topic and divided out before anything is measured.

49%

Human traffic

Bot and scraper traffic is flat across the week. Anything with implausibly low day-to-day variation, or with no weekday/weekend pattern at all, is dropped before it reaches this page.

0.95× weekend

Enough history to judge

Long enough to separate this year's move from last year's level.

521 days

Confirmed somewhere else

No second source yet. Common for consumer and culture topics, which do not show up in developer data.

0 of 4 sources

What it is

Wikipedia

Lachryphagy is the practice of feeding on tears and other eye secretions. Certain bees, butterflies, and flies have been observed feeding on the tears of reptiles, birds, and mammals, including humans. Lachryphagous insects gather nutrients, especially sodium and proteins, from the tears. Lachryphagous feeding can be unbothersome or painful, with some feeding insects damaging the eye and introducing pathogens to the host. Lachryphagy has been studied as a form of parasitism, commensalism, and puddling.

Near this on the curve

Science & Environment
039

AllatRa

Science & Environment · 63k views/mo ·1 outside source
13×
vs baseline
emerging