New York: A recent study has revealed that not only humans, even animals get drunk!
Evidences found during the study showed that alcohol is present naturally in almost every ecosystem on Earth, be it in the form of sugary or fermented fruits, or sap and nectar in flowers.
While some animals don’t get overpowered by the intoxicating effect of the liquor and just put on weight, others get inebriated like homo sapiens, The Guardian reported.
“We’re moving away from this anthropocentric view that alcohol is used by just humans and that actually ethanol is quite abundant in the natural world,” said Anna Bowland, a researcher in the team at University of Exeter.
In southeastern Guinea, wild chimpanzees were caught on camera consuming the alcoholic sap of raffia palms.
“Evidence is growing that humans are not drinking alone,” wrote authors of Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
Ethanol became abundant on Earth about 100 million years ago. Flowering plants produced sugary fruits and nectar which was fermented by yeast.
There are many stories of intoxicated animals, “from elephants and baboons drunk on marula fruit in Botswana, to a moose found with its head stuck in a tree in Sweden after chomping on fermented apples.”
College of Central Florida’s Matthew Carrigan, who worked on the review with Bowland, said, “One of our next steps is the test whether animals in the wild prefer ethanol-containing food or eat it only when ethanol levels are too low to detect or unfermented fruit is hard to find.”
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