This month, I embarked on the overnight rail experience of a lifetime: Finland's Santa Claus Express.
The Booze-Soaked Lives of Wild Animals
03.12.2024 - 22:53 / atlasobscura.com
A gag in “Piker’s Peak,” a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1957, plays off the trope of the Saint Bernard rescue dog carrying brandy to warm up an avalanche victim. After digging Yosemite Sam out of the snow, the dog opens the barrel in its collar to reveal a cocktail shaker and martini glass, and ignores the frozen Sam as it mixes itself a drink.
There’s something charmingly funny about the image of an animal drinking alcohol; it seems so incongruously humanlike. Some documentaries that show wild animals getting drunk off boozy rotten fruit, like this one from Botswana, use music and narration to emphasize the unexpected comedy of the scene. Scientists once believed that such behavior was random and accidental, especially in species not closely related to humans and other great apes. But more recent studies paint a very different picture. A research review published in October 2024 in Trends in Ecology & Evolution found that wherever ethanol—the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages—occurs in nature, it is routinely consumed by a variety of species, from insects and birds to rodents and monkeys.
In nature, “ethanol ingestion is far more common than was previously thought,” says Anna Bowland, a Ph.D. student in bioscience at the University of Exeter, England, who worked on the review. The paper cites research mainly from tropical regions like Central America and Southeast Asia, where yeast and bacteria ferment the natural sugars in fruit and nectar into ethanol in the hot sun. But a similar effect has also been observed in completely different environments. In Finland, when wild berries thaw in the warm sun after being bruised by frost, “they ferment quite quickly,” says Bowland. “And then as the birds come and feed on them, they’re ingesting alcohol.”
Because animals that feed on fruit and nectar ingest more ethanol on average, many of them show evolutionary adaptations to tolerate it. The review cites a study from the rainforests of Malaysia, which found that arboreal mammals like treeshrews, lorises, and squirrels regularly feed on fermented palm nectar with an alcohol concentration as high as 3.8 percent, comparable to a light beer. But intriguingly, says Bowland, “they don’t—in our anthropogenic sense—seem to get drunk,” meaning that they don’t display behaviors associated with inebriation in humans, like drowsiness or reduced motor skills. This suggests that treeshrews are particularly good at metabolizing ethanol.
Bowland explains that from an evolutionary standpoint, “it’s not beneficial for [animals] to get drunk, because that can lead to predation and injury and reduce survival, so they might not pass on their genes.” Animals that feed on a boozy food source have a better chance of survival if
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