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Elephants Really Can't Hold Their Liquor
Elephants Really Can't Hold Their Liquor
Humans and other species have a gene mutation that lets them digest alcohol. In
other species, it’s missing.
Humans are not the only animals that get drunk. Birds that gorge on fermented
berries and sap are known to fall out of trees and crash into windows. Elk that
overdo it with rotting apples get stuck in trees. Moose wasted on overripe crab
apples get tangled in swing sets, hammocks and even Christmas lights.
If you are one who wanted to believe, a study published in April in Biology Letters
might serve as your vindication. A team of scientists say that the earlier myth-
busting researchers made a common mistake: They assumed that elephants would
have to consume as much alcohol to get drunk as humans do. In fact, elephants are
likely exceptional lightweights because they — and many other mammals — lack a
key enzyme that quickly metabolizes ethanol. The findings highlight the need to
consider species on an individual basis.
“You can’t just assume that humans are just like every other mammal and the
physiological abilities of all these mammals are comparable,” said Mareike Janiak,
a postdoctoral scholar in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Calgary
and the lead author of the study. “Simply scaling up to body size doesn’t account for
differences that exist between different mammal species.”
Image
A herd of wild elephants was reportedly on a drunken rampage outside the village
of Tundi, India, in 2006.Credit...Sasanka Sen/Associated Press
To test whether other species independently evolved the same adaptation, Dr.
Janiak and her colleagues searched the genomes of 85 mammals that eat a variety
of foods and located the ethanol-metabolizing gene in 79 species. But they
identified the same or similar mutation as humans in just six species — mostly
those with a diet high in fruit and nectar, including flying foxes and aye-aye lemurs.
But most other mammals did not possess the mutation, and in some species,
including elephants, dogs and cows, the ethanol-metabolizing gene had lost all
function.
“It was far more likely for animals that eat the leafy part of plants or for carnivores
to lose the gene,” said Amanda Melin, a molecular ecologist at the University of
Calgary and a co-author of the study. “The takeaway is that diet is important in
what we see happening in molecular evolution.”
Some results were unexpected. Tree shrews, for example, drink “copious amounts”
of fermented nectar with ethanol content equivalent to weak beer, Dr. Melin said,
but they never show signs of inebriation. Yet tree shews do not share the same
enzyme-producing mutation as humans. This implies that “there’s multiple,
different ways to solve this problem,” she said.
The elephant findings, in particular, are “interesting but confusing,” said Chris
Thouless, the head of research at Save the Elephants, a nonprofit in Kenya. Forest
elephants today regularly seek and eat fruit, but their ancestors became grass
eaters around eight million years ago. Evidence indicates they then switched to a
mixed diet around one million years ago.
“Maybe they lost the ability to efficiently metabolize alcohol, but either continued
to have, or regained, a taste for and the ability to locate fruit,” Dr. Thouless said. He
compared it with people who have very low tolerance for alcohol but still desire and
drink it.
While the new study reveals the means by which elephants and other mammals
may become inebriated, it does not explicitly confirm the phenomena in nature.