Oriental hornets can't get drunk

 (economist.com)

29 points | by ioblomov5 days ago

6 comments

  • arnefm1 day ago
    Those poor hornets. Is there anything we can do to help them?
    • er4hn1 day ago
      dose them with psilocybin and do studies to see what it does for their hostility towards other living creatures.
      • hinkley22 hours ago
        "You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."
  • cm21871 day ago
    I 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.

    • oever1 day ago
      Lemonade 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.

    • williamdclt1 day ago
      that 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
      • digging1 day ago
        Seems likely. That exact setup is also a (mediocre) fruit fly trap.
  • pfdietz5 days ago
    But do they also have multiple copies of aldehyde dehydrogenase, the next enzyme? Acetaldehyde is toxic and mutagenic.
    • mlyle1 day ago
      Mutagenic things are less of a concern when your lifespan is several months.
    • ioblomov1 day ago
      According to the Interwebs, acetaldehyde's toxicity to insects is apparently less studied. Presumably these hornets can take it in stride.
  • runamuck1 day ago
    Any 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.
    • aithrowawaycomm1 day ago
      If 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_lishin1 day ago
        Some of the social effect is a placebo.
        • tasty_freeze1 day ago
          I 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!"

    • SoftTalker1 day ago
      Order club soda with a lime slice. It looks like a gin and tonic but you won't get drunk.
    • pavel_lishin1 day ago
      Many 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!

      • caseyohara1 day ago
        Non-alcoholic beers have gotten really good in the last few years. In the US, Athletic Brewing Company is doing great stuff. I haven't tried their IPA, but their lagers and lighter beers are surprisingly good and an adequate substitute for the "ritual" of beer drinking.
        • 486sx333 hours ago
          Try erdinger non-alkoholic “for sport”

          https://us.erdinger.de/beer/non-alcoholic.html

          For good mouthfeel !

        • pavel_lishin1 day ago
          I've tried their light beers, and didn't particularly like them.

          Weirdly, even though I hate IPAs, I think I liked the alcohol-free IPA stuff better. It feels more "authentic", I think - likely because I don't drink IPAs, so I can't tell that something is off without the alcohol.

      • ioblomov1 day ago
        FWIW, drinking alcohol won't interfere with most modern antibiotics. The exception is metronidazole and related compounds, because they interfere with aldehyde dehydrogenase (leading to a buildup of toxic aldehydes, an intermediate compound in alcohol metabolism).

        https://www.drugs.com/article/antibiotics-and-alcohol.html

        • pavel_lishin1 day ago
          So why have I always been told not to? I swear I remember reading that antibiotics and alcohol, combined, stress out the liver, but apparently that's not the case with Amoxycillin?

          Anyway, I guess it's probably for the best to limit my drinking anyway. Except for Saturday at the party, which we shan't speak of, nor of Sunday morning.

        • selimthegrim1 day ago
          While not an antibiotic, it also doesn’t play well with antifungals like terbinafine
      • williamdclt1 day ago
        "IPA-flavoured" is a bit dismissive. Alcohol-free beer is not flavoured water, it's beer that's had its alcohol removed. Non-alc IPA is an IPA with extra steps!
        • pavel_lishin1 day ago
          I meant to be dismissive in a joking way - I dislike the taste of IPAs, but they definitely taste Like Beer to me, even once the alcohol removal process has taken place. Athletic's light beers, though, taste off in a way that really doesn't work for me when I'm in the mood for the social aspect of drinking a beer, but not for most of the mental and physical ffects.
        • brnt21 hours ago
          Removing alcohol is only one method. I prefer beers made with modified yeasts.
          • williamdclt16 hours ago
            I didn't know that, interesting!
    • the_sleaze_1 day ago
      There's Kava or Kratom - I've not tried them myself but I have heard good things about their ability to ease social situation like alcohol without alcohol's side effects.
  • rkagerer1 day ago
    Will 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