Bat's secret to sobriety

Getting a bit tipsy, staggering about and desperately trying to sober up may be a familiar feeling to the party animals amongst you – and now scientists have found that bats do the same.

It may have had a skin-full, but Egyptian fruit bats can handle their booze.

Researchers have shown that as the level of ethanol rises in fruits when they ripen, the Egyptian fruit bat - which has a penchant for ripe fruit – has an ideal way to sober up. 
 

Francisco Sanchez and colleagues at Ben-Gurion University in Israel found the sugar molecule, fructose, is the bat’s secret to sobriety. Ethanol levels measured in fruit bat breath declined faster after the bats fed on fructose-containing food than when the food contained either sucrose or glucose.

Sanchez and his colleagues detailed their findings on intoxicated bats at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting in Glasgow. “There is very little research on the effect of ethanol in wild animals,” he explained.

Alcohol levels as low as 1% can not only slow the bats reaction time causing it to be sluggish – a very real danger for animals that have to avoid predators – but it can actually be toxic to the bats. The team found that when the amount of ethanol in food increased, the fruit bats preferred food containing fructose over glucose-containing food. However, it seems that however drunk, the bats rate taste above any kind of sobering-up effect as they preferred food containing sucrose above either of the other two sugars.


“We think that this observation may be due to a matter of taste or flavour”, said Sanchez, “The perception of sweetness versus bitterness may vary according the type of sugar and the amount of ethanol consumed.”