Drunk Elephants: Do other animals get drunk too?

Drunk Elephants

Without a doubt, humans have been drinking alcohol for thousands of years. But have we been drinking alone? Alcohol  occurs thanks to yeast. In their natural habitats, yeast will spontaneously ferment sugary fruits, and other creatures may come along and eat a boozy apple now and again. Rumors abound of elephants intoxicated on marula fruit, birds flying drunk after pecking hawthorne, and honeybees staggering after their own stash of honey has fermented. Animals get drunk too! Such a notion, it seems, may be too good to be true.

The elephant in the room here is that elephants probably do not get drunk in the wild. Naturally fermented marula fruit, even consumed in vast quantities, likely cannot change the blood alcohol of a 10,000 pound pachyderm. Of course, not all organisms are able to metabolize the poison of ethanol efficiently, and so some become drunk far quicker than others.

A study by Morris, Humphrey, and Reynolds delves into the question of how much an elephant would have to drink in order to be drunk. They argue, “extrapolating from human physiology, a 3,000-kg elephant would require the ingestion of between 10 and 27 L of 7% ethanol in a short period to overtly affect behavior.” An elephant would need at least a case of wine to get its party on!

The Marula fruit
The Marula fruit from Bernard DUPONT from FRANCE, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

A second study by Siegal and Brodie intentionally got elephants drunk by restricting the pachyderm’s access to water and offering 7% and 10% alcohol solutions instead. The Asian and African elephants they studied would become lethargic and antisocial drunks. In a context without man-made alcohol, marula fruit do not normally ferment to a high degree. The amount of fruit that an elephant would need to hold in its body and process at one time is improbable enough to debunk the myth of drunk elephants. While we may envision pink elephants in our drunken stupors, the elephant itself is decidedly sober.

If elephants are too big, and the fermented fruits too weak, then perhaps a smaller organism would do. Infamous lightweights, birds are avid consumers of berries and small fruits throughout winter months when yeast have had a chance to begin fermentation. According to a study by Eriksson and Nummi, rose hips can have a relatively high alcohol content by weight as they ferment from November to January. The curious scientists fed several kinds of birds including waxwings, starlings, and greenfinches fermented berries and found that birds had measurable alcohol in their blood at noon, but at no other time of the day. At a maximum, some birds reached a 0.02 % BAC–legally still able to drive. None of their avian subjects showed any signs of intoxication. Interestingly, birds that had a diet largely consisting of fruit processed alcohol far more quickly thanks to an efficient alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzyme that they had adapted. So the birds that are most likely to get drunk are also the best equipped to cope with booze.

Rosehips
Rosehips, common in some birds' diets, can ferment to a considerable degree in winter months from Kritzolina, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Perhaps even birds are too large to become drunk on natural amounts of ethanol in their diets. If not birds, what about bees? At last, we arrive at an animal, albeit an invertebrate, that does become drunk in natural environments. Honey bees will naturally encounter fermented nectars in hot and humid areas at least some of the time. Evidence suggests that nectar can naturally reach 10% ethanol and a dissertation by Stone shows that bees will choose to eat 5% ethanol foods when offered several options. Drunk bees have many of the attributes that drunk humans exhibit–they have trouble moving normally, they get lost, they are not allowed to go home because the bee guards keep them out, and they avoid flavors that got them too drunk. You can even test out some of these drunken behaviors, as bees will seek out beer and wine residues and willingly consume them.

It follows that the ultimate alcoholic animal is also an invertebrate, but this creature does not always get drunk either.  Animals get drunk on fermented fruit, so who is more likely than the fruit fly to encounter booze in nature? If we leave bananas on the counter for too long, not only will they begin to ferment, but they will attract a swarm of tiny black flies. Certain species of fruit flies actually seek out fermented products and lay eggs in them. Larvae literally grow in an alcoholic solution.

These species of flies do not get drunk because they have a well developed ADH enzyme. This enzyme is actually the closest known animal ADH enzyme to the human version, 15-hydroxyprostaglandindehydrogenase. Other fruit flies that do not produce these enzymes will get drunk quickly. They won’t be able to fly–even walking becomes a challenge.

According to Michael Ashburner the ancestors of the alcohol-resistant flies were some of the first consumers of booze. There is evidence that they developed ADH enzymes contemporary to fungi developing ethanol producing abilities 60 million years ago. As soon as there was booze in nature, evolution figured out how to turn the toxin into useful energy with enzymes.

Drunk flies and bumbling bees are hardly a threat to human existence. Larger animals, in general, do not naturally get drunk–but that does not mean they won’t get drunk in artificial settings. Scientific research, occasionally claiming to focus on alcohol addiction in humans, has a history of exposing a wide variety of animals to the effects of ethanol. Rats and mice have been bred to be actual alcoholics. Goldfish swimming in booze have been made to learn mazes. Elephants, monkeys, and even ants have not avoided this peer pressure from the scientific community to have a stiff drink. None of these creatures naturally get drunk (especially goldfish), but scientific curiosity about animal intoxication echoes the same sentiments that our drunk elephant rumors do–humans don’t want to drink alone, we want some extra-special company

Drunk Animals

Sources Cited

Ashburner, Michael. “Speculations on the subject of alcohol dehydrogenase and its properties in Drosophila and other flies.” Bioessays 20.11 (1998): 949-954.

Dudley, Robert, and Michael Dickinson. “The comparative biology of ethanol consumption: an introduction to the symposium.” Integrative and Comparative Biology 44.4 (2004): 267-268.

Dudley, Robert. “Fermenting fruit and the historical ecology of ethanol ingestion: is alcoholism in modern humans an evolutionary hangover?.” Addiction 97.4 (2002): 381-388.

Eriksson & Nummi (1982) fednaturally fermenting fruits to captive individuals of twobird species, and recorded maximum blood-ethanol concentrations of about 0.02%. Similarly, Fitzgerald et al.(1990) documented ethanol toxicosis in cedar waxwingsthat had been feeding on fermenting hawthorn fruits

Eriksson, Kalervo, and Helena Nummi. “Alcohol accumulation from ingested berries and alcohol metabolism in passerine birds.” Ornis Fenn 60 (1982): 2-9.

Levey, Douglas J. “The evolutionary ecology of ethanol production and alcoholism.” Integrative and comparative biology 44.4 (2004): 284-289.

Marcucella, H., and C. I. Abramson. “Behavioral toxicology and teleost fish.” The behavior of fish and other aquatic animals (1978): 33-77.

Morris, Steve, David Humphreys, and Dan Reynolds. “Myth, marula, and elephant: an assessment of voluntary ethanol intoxication of the African elephant (Loxodonta africana) following feeding on the fruit of the marula tree (Sclerocarya birrea).” Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 79.2 (2006): 363-369.

Privalova, Valeriya. “Chronic tolerance to ethanol in the honeybee (Apis mellifera L.).” (2018).

Stone, Sherril M. Self-administration of alcohol in honey bees. Diss. Oklahoma State University, 1999.

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