For the last 55 million years, the pen-tailed shrew has survived on a diet consisting of beer.
How's that for an evolutionary bender?
The shrew lives in the forest of Malaysia and feeds on the flowers of the bertam palm. Produced year-round and constantly fermenting, its nectar is about 3.8 percent alcohol -- roughly equivalent to a Sam Adams light.
"Fine," you say, "except that's a light beer!" But cut the shrew some slack -- it doesn't eat anything else. Let's see you subsist on nothing but beer, light or not, and stay sober.
That's the shrews' most amazing quality: they don't get drunk. On any given night, said researchers in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one-third of the shrews have a blood-alcohol level that would leave us under the bar -- but there's no evidence of intoxication.
The findings suggest a highly-developed alcohol degradation mechanism; perhaps the insights will lead to human hangover treatments. And should the pen-tailed shrew ever be threatened by habitat destruction and climate change, the species can be saved by relocation American frat houses.
Chronic intake of fermented floral nectar by wild treeshrews [PNAS]
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Image: Annette Zitzmann*
See Also:
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- No @#&!, Sherlock: The Alcohol Edition
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- What Kind of Liquor Hits You the Hardest?
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