Lynn forwarded a story from Fox News about bats who have learned how to sober up when they become intoxicated.
Bats often risk getting drunk off cocktails of alcohol that stew inside ripened fruit. And just as driving is dangerous for intoxicated humans, so is flying for drunken bats.
Now scientists find bats are savvy enough to dine on certain types of fruit sugar to help them get over the ill effects of alcohol. These findings could shed light on how wildlife deals with alcohol.
[…]
Fruits such as figs and dates accumulate ethanol, or drinking alcohol, as they ripen. While Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) prefer such fruits when they are ripe, as little as a 1 percent concentration of ethanol is toxic for the bats. Even concentrations of less than 1 percent ethanol can make fruit bats sluggish against predators or hamper their ability to avoid obstacles.
[…]
“There is very little [research] on the effect of ethanol in wild animals,” explained biologist Francisco Sanchez at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.
Sanchez and his colleagues gave Egyptian fruit bats liquid meals that contained miniscule levels of drinking alcohol and either fructose, glucose or sucrose. Glucose is a simple sugar found in most plant and animal tissue, while sucrose, commonly known as table sugar, is a combination of one fructose molecule and one glucose molecule.
Breath tests revealed that alcohol levels dropped faster after feeding on fructose-loaded meals than when given food containing either sucrose or glucose.
They also found that as the amount of booze in food increased, the fruit bats preferred fructose-rich food more than glucose-laden food.
As usual, more details can be found in the original article.
[Fox News: Study: Drunken bats sober up on sugar]
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