JERUSALEM, Oct. 27 (Xinhua) -- An Israeli study found that oriental hornets are able to consume unlimited amounts of alcohol, according to a statement issued by Tel Aviv University (TAU) on Sunday.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), revealed that oriental hornets can consume alcohol chronically and in high concentrations with almost no negative effects on their health or lifespan.

The findings could potentially lead to new models for studying alcoholism and alcohol metabolism, TAU noted.

Alcohol is commonly produced through the breakdown of sugars by yeasts and bacteria, primarily found in ripe fruits and nectar. Although alcohol contains nearly twice the energy of sugar, it is toxic to most animals and humans, especially with chronic use.

Among the animals known to consume alcohol are fruit flies, which show signs of alcohol poisoning even at low concentrations, and treeshrews, mammals native to East Asia that feed on ripe, alcohol-rich fruits and exhibit symptoms such as fatty liver.

In the study, the team labeled the alcohol consumed by hornets with a heavy carbon isotope and found a rapid rate at which the hornets metabolized the alcohol and exhaled it as carbon dioxide.

It was also found that even when consuming high concentrations of alcohol, there was no noticeable effect on the hornets' behavior, proving they do not become intoxicated.

Furthermore, there were no differences in the lifespan of hornets that consumed only alcohol for their entire three-month lives compared to those that consumed sugar water.

The study found in a bioinformatics analysis that the hornet possesses several copies of the gene responsible for producing the enzyme that breaks down alcohol.

This genetic adaptation may be related to their remarkable ability to handle alcohol.

The researchers proposed that hornets' yeast storage in their digestive systems, which allows the yeast to grow and be transferred to fruits, led to the development of this genetic adaptation. Enditem

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