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Oriental hornets can't get drunk
- ioblomov 2y agohttps://archive.ph/oEH7n https://archive.ph/oEH7n
- pfdietz 2y agoBut do they also have multiple copies of aldehyde dehydrogenase, the next enzyme? Acetaldehyde is toxic and mutagenic.
- ioblomov 2y agoAccording to the Interwebs, acetaldehyde's toxicity to insects is apparently less studied. Presumably these hornets can take it in stride.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoIt seems quite toxic in fruit flies if the hydrogenase has been disabled: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/096517489290115U https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/096517... So to get to OP's point, I am assuming that if the hornets couldn't detoxify acetaldehyde, then they would exhibit some sort of "hangover" even if it didn't kill them. But even the 80% ABV hornets seemed totally unaffected.
- mlyle 2y agoMutagenic things are less of a concern when your lifespan is several months.
- runamuck 2y agoAny chance scientists can make a drug for humans to have this benefit? This could help in tense relationship building/ repair. You get the social bonding of pounding alcohol w/o the negative effects of drunkeness.
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoIf there was such a drug you wouldn't get the social effects: these hornets don't get drunk at all, they metabolize the alcohol too quickly for it to affect their brains. It's not like they get a euphoric buzz without the social impairment :)
- pavel_lishin 2y agoSome of the social effect is a placebo.
- tasty_freeze 2y agoI witnessed this when I spent a month inside the offices of a large Japanese company in Kyoto. In that month there were three different dinners out for the whole office, all of them involving alcohol. One of the engineers told me as an aside, because Japanese culture frowns on contradicting or questioning one's superiors, social drinking was a tacit mechanism where people could express their doubts about project direction and such without repercussion, as another part of the tacit rules were that what someone said while drunk shouldn't be held too strongly against them. Even after a few sips people would get more boisterous and the buttoned-down civility would drop. I didn't speak much Japanese so I can only imagine what was being said, probably something like "Boss, I'm not too confident that spending so much time adding the suchandsuch feature is worth delaying the project, but I'm just a junior engineer so I don't know what I'm talking about, hah hah. Kampai!"
- lowestprimate 2y agoIn Vino Veritas! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vino_veritas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vino_veritas
- pavel_lishin 2y agoMany bars offer alcohol-free beers. I've been on antibiotics for a week, so I haven't been drinking, but we had some alcohol-free beers left over from a party. They're all IPA-flavored, so they taste authentically awful!
- arnefm 2y agoThose poor hornets. Is there anything we can do to help them?
- er4hn 2y agodose them with psilocybin and do studies to see what it does for their hostility towards other living creatures.
- hinkley 2y ago"You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."
- Dilettante_ 2y agoI'm perfectly calm, Dude.
- cm2187 2y agoI remember the way we built wasp/hornet traps in the french countryside. Take a plastic bottle of water, cut it in two (top vs bottom), invert the top so the bottle opening is pointing toward the bottom, and fill the bottom of the bottle with wine. Wasps and hornets are attracted by the wine, get in easily, then get drunk and apparently can't find their way out through the narrow bottle opening and die drowning in the wine. Well I guess not those ones.
- williamdclt 2y agothat works with water and sugar, I don't think that it's being drunk that's the problem, the liquid is just bait. It's probably just hard to get back to the hole? No space to fly, not easy to climb the inside of the bottle because of the shape (bottle top pointing down). Maybe being wet and sticky doesn't help either
- digging 2y agoSeems likely. That exact setup is also a (mediocre) fruit fly trap.
- oever 2y agoLemonade works as well for attracting wasps. Mosquito's are attracted to CO₂. Put ⅓ sugar, ⅔ water and yeast in the same container to lure them.
- rkagerer 2y agoWill this lead to a new expression "Sober as an Oriental hornet"? I'm a bit disappointed Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about this surprising physiological characteristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_hornet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_hornet
- selimthegrim 2y agoInteresting that these also have some static electricity features that are like those commented upon in a recent HN submission