Drunk butterflies and other animals

If you thought only people could get drunk, you're wrong. The animals in the animal kingdom can do it too. Accidentally often, but still…Today in the spotlights were drinking butterflies, white-tailed deer and moose.

Insects

Male butterflies often drink beer to improve their spermatophores – nutrient-rich packets they give to females as a nuptial gift. So you find a butterfly in your beer can? Now you know why. By the way, butterflies are not necessarily picky. If there is no beer available, a glass of wine tastes just as good. Not only butterflies can appreciate such a head, entomologists very often lure insects with beer.

Mammals

Besides insects, there are also mammals that get (accidentally) drunk from time to time. Usually through nectar or fermented fruit. It is not uncommon for animals in a region where a lot of fruit is grown to get drunk sometimes. For example, groggy white-tailed deer and moose have been spotted.

The Drunk Monkey Hypothesis

It is not for nothing that we all take an alcohol break together. We drink it just a little too often because it relaxes us, because we forget for a moment that we've had a bad day and because it's just good. But why do we like alcohol so much? For that we have to go to our ape-like ancestors.

To explain the weakness for alcohol, we have to go back millions of years. A time when our ape-like ancestors discovered the scent of ripe, fermenting and nourishing fruit. Fruit that naturally has a high alcohol content, up to 7 percent. There seems to be tentative evidence that wild monkeys then and now consciously choose fruits with ethanol.

Our ape-like ancestors ate the ethanol-containing fruit just for energy. We humans prefer to ignore the filling pulp of fermented fruit and drink alcohol in a liquid form. As a result, we often drink too much of it. Who is the smarter of the two here?…

Source: scientas.nl.

Read the whole article about the drunk monkey hypothesis here.