If you are a regular reader of my blog, then you’ll know that the Syrian hamster “can drink you under the table” (per the Manswers episode featuring my lab).  This isn’t shocking given that the Syrian hamster, a desert-dwelling creature in its natural environment, eats fermented fruit. After burying fruit in the ground, these animals let the fruit ferment, recover it (I imagine it tastes like the passion fruit in sangria), and get drunk. Actually, these animals have an extremely high tolerance for alcohol, which means overt behavioral impairments following ad libitum alcohol consumption is rare. Giving Syrian hamsters an acute, systemic injection of a high alcohol dose is a different story…….

Which animal can drink you under the table?

It appears that Syrian hamsters aren’t the only mammals that can drink humans, even members of Greek life and athletic teams, under the table. Frugivorous fruit bats show high tolerance to alcohol in that marked alcohol consumption doesn’t impair flying and/or echolocation. Oxfordian researchers fed various frugivorous bat species 1.5% alcohol and attempted to determine any deleterious effects .There were none, though there was variability in the clearance rate of alcohol from the blood. Below is a histogram adopted from the paper which shows that roughly 20% of these bats achieved BAC near 0.3%! To quote my advisor during his 15 minutes of fame on Manswers, “I would never want to have a shooters contest with one of these!”


ResearchBlogging.org

Dara N. Orbach, Nina Veselka, Yvonne Dzal, Louis Lazure, M. Brock Fenton (2010). Drinking and Flying: Does Alcohol Consumption Affect
the Flight and Echolocation Performance of Phyllostomid
Bats?
PLOS One, 5 (2) : 10.1371/journal.pone.0008993