[HN Gopher] Oriental hornets can't get drunk
___________________________________________________________________
Oriental hornets can't get drunk
Author : ioblomov
Score : 22 points
Date : 2024-10-25 00:21 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| ioblomov wrote:
| https://archive.ph/oEH7n
| pfdietz wrote:
| But do they also have multiple copies of aldehyde dehydrogenase,
| the next enzyme? Acetaldehyde is toxic and mutagenic.
| ioblomov wrote:
| According to the Interwebs, acetaldehyde's toxicity to insects
| is apparently less studied. Presumably these hornets can take
| it in stride.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| It seems quite toxic in fruit flies if the hydrogenase has
| been disabled: 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 wrote:
| Mutagenic things are less of a concern when your lifespan is
| several months.
| runamuck wrote:
| 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.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| 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_lishin wrote:
| Some of the social effect is a placebo.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| 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!"
| lowestprimate wrote:
| In Vino Veritas!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vino_veritas
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 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!
| caseyohara wrote:
| 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.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| 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.
| williamdclt wrote:
| "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_lishin wrote:
| 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.
| ioblomov wrote:
| 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_lishin wrote:
| 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.
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Order club soda with a lime slice. It looks like a gin and
| tonic but you won't get drunk.
| arnefm wrote:
| Those poor hornets. Is there anything we can do to help them?
| er4hn wrote:
| dose them with psilocybin and do studies to see what it does
| for their hostility towards other living creatures.
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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.
| williamdclt wrote:
| 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
| digging wrote:
| Seems likely. That exact setup is also a (mediocre) fruit fly
| trap.
| oever wrote:
| Lemonade works as well for attracting wasps.
|
| Mosquito's are attracted to CO2. Put 1/3 sugar, 2/3 water
| and yeast in the same container to lure them.
| rkagerer wrote:
| 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
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-10-28 23:01 UTC)