Drunken animals are more common than previously thought, helping to explain humans’ love of alcohol: study

(Hill) — A new study suggests that alcohol — and the animals that like to consume it — are much more common in the natural world than scientists previously thought.

Because ethanol—a type of alcohol formed from fruit and grain sugars—is present in almost every environment, most fruit-eating and nectar-sipping animals likely consume it, according to the data. conclusions published Wednesday in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

The discovery forced researchers to move away from the human-centered view that “ethanol is just something that people use,” University of Exeter behavioral ecologist and senior author Kimberly Hawkings said in a statement.

Ethanol, Hawkings noted, has a very long history. Flowering and fruit-bearing plants and vines first appeared in the late Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago, making them about the same age as Tyrannosaurus rex.

As fallen fruit ages, yeasts in the air and on the surface of the fruit itself convert the sugars into ethanol—one reason rotten fruit can smell a little like beer or wine.

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These fruits tend not to achieve high proof – usually 1-2 percent alcohol by volume (ABV), or somewhere between kombucha and “three or two” beers — though scientists have found some rotten palm fruit in Panama to exceed 10 percent ABV, putting it in the same neighborhood as wine.

But for a bird or small mammal feasting on lightly alcoholic fruit, even 1-2 percent can be enough to get a potentially deadly high.

“Being drunk when you’re climbing trees or surrounded by predators at night is a recipe for not passing on your genes,” co-author and professor of molecular ecology at the College of Central Florida, Matthew Kerrigan, said in a statement.

Ethanol-eating animals, including our own primate ancestors, which diverged from other mammals about 15 million years after the appearance of fruit-bearing plants, have the opposite problems of modern humans when it comes to alcohol, Carrigan added.

Unlike “humans who want to be high but don’t really want calories—from a non-human perspective, animals want calories but not high.”

Therefore, animals that eat this fruit often have genes that help them break down ethanol without getting drunk—allowing them to take advantage of the characteristic sickly-sweet smell to find the fruit without risking a predator hitting them EWI (Eaten While intoxicated).

But the idea that animals avoid drunkenness is a hypothesis, not a well-founded conclusion; The researchers emphasized that they do not know whether the animals are seeking intoxication.

One of the biggest megatrends of the past decade in ecology and biology is the growing consensus that sentience—and intelligence—is far more common. than was thought. And social drinking can be good for intelligent communities: Among our primate branch, anthropologists believe that social drinking helped—or even caused— formation of the first cities.

For social animals such as birds and some mammals, the researchers said, there may be a benefit to drinking to help outweigh the effects of intoxication — a hypothesis that first requires finding out whether intoxication in animals looks like it does in humans. .

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Along with the paper, the researchers published photos of primates such as capuchin monkeys, spider monkeys and even chimpanzees eating the alcoholic fruit.

This could potentially provide benefits, behavioral ecologist and first author Anna Bowland of the University of Exeter said in a statement.

“On the cognitive side, the idea has been that ethanol can trigger the endorphin and dopamine system, leading to a feeling of relaxation that may have benefits in terms of sociality,” Bowland said.

But “to test this, we really need to know if ethanol causes a physiological response in the wild.”

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