The oriental hornet shows no ill effects – or behavioural changes – when it spends a week drinking an 80 per cent alcohol solution A species of ho

Hornets can hold their alcohol like no other animal on Earth

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2024-10-31 20:00:06

The oriental hornet shows no ill effects – or behavioural changes – when it spends a week drinking an 80 per cent alcohol solution

A species of hornet that often munches on foods containing alcohol can hold its liquor, without any side effects, at levels that no other known animal can tolerate.

The diet of the oriental hornet (Vespa orientalis) consists of nectar and ripe fruits, including grapes. This fruit contains sugar that, when it naturally ferments over time, turns into ethanol.

While ethanol can be nutritious for animals, it is also highly intoxicating. Even animals that routinely eat fermenting fruits – like fruit flies and tree shrews – cannot stomach more than 4 per cent ethanol in their meals, according to Bouchebti and her colleagues.

But when Bouchebti’s team gave hornets nothing to eat for a week except a range of sugary solutions containing different quantities of ethanol – between 1 and 80 per cent – the hornets seemed to be completely unaffected. Both their behaviour and lifespan remained unchanged. What makes this particularly surprising is that the solutions with 80 per cent ethanol contain an alcohol content four times as high as anything found in nature.

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