Animals guzzle alcohol and get sloshed all the time, study finds

If you think alcohol is only consumed by humans, then you are wrong. A study has found that animals have been getting their buzz on for hundreds of years, gorging on ethanol.

Ethanol is a kind of alcohol formed from fruit and grain sugars and is present in almost every environment. Every animal and bird that digs into these foods end up consuming it, according to findings published on Wednesday in Trends in Ecology & Evolution.

The University of Exeter behavioural ecologist and senior author Kimberley Hockings said in a statement that the finding makes them step away from the notion that “ethanol is just something that humans use".

She states that alcohol-bearing fruits have been around for nearly 100 million years, first sprouting on Earth in the late Cretaceous period. This means that they were on the planet alongside the Tyrannosaurus rex.

Ethanol is observed in rotting fruits that smell a bit like beer or wine. This happens when fruits fall from the trees and yeasts in the air and the surface of the fruit itself converts sugar into ethanol. These fruits don't have a lot of alcohol, only about 1 to 2 per cent alcohol by volume (ABV). This is somewhere between a kombucha and “three-two” beers.

However, some rotting palm fruit in Panama have been found to exceed 10 per cent ABV, on the same lines as wine.

Even little alcohol can make animals dangerously drunk

But even that amount of alcohol in fruit is enough to make an animal tipsy, which can also prove lethal for them as they move around.

"It is not advantageous to be inebriated as you’re climbing around in the trees or surrounded by predators at night—that’s a recipe for not having your genes passed on,” coauthor and College of Central Florida professor of molecular ecology Matthew Carrigan said in a statement.

The problem is that animals who eat ethanol don't want to get inebriated unlike humans who consume alcohol for that reason, Carrigan said. Most of these animals are our own primate ancestors who branched out of other mammals about 15 million years after the rise of fruit-bearing plants.

Unlike “humans who want to get intoxicated but don’t really want the calories—from the non-human perspective, the animals want the calories but not the inebriation.” As such, these animals often have genes that help them break down ethanol without getting drunk.

However, there is no evidence to suggest that the animals are actively trying to avoid getting drunk. They might even be seeking out alcohol to get intoxicated, although they don't know which is true.