Many animals, including humans, have developed a taste for alcohol in some form, but excessive consumption often leads to adverse health effects. One exception is the Oriental wasp. According to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these wasps can guzzle seemingly unlimited amounts of ethanol regularly and at very high concentrations with no ill effects—not even intoxication. They pretty much drank honeybees used in the same experiments under the table.
“To the best of our knowledge, Oriental hornets are the only animal in nature adapted to consuming alcohol as a metabolic fuel,” said co-author Eran Levin of Tel Aviv University. “They show no signs of intoxication or illness, even after chronically consuming huge amounts of alcohol, and they eliminate it from their bodies very quickly.”
Per Levin et al., there’s a “drunken monkey” theory that predicts that certain animals well-adapted to low concentrations of ethanol in their diets nonetheless have adverse reactions at higher concentrations. Studies have shown that tree shrews, for example, can handle concentrations of up to 3.8 percent, but in laboratory conditions, when they consumed ethanol in concentrations of 10 percent or higher, they were prone to liver damage.
