

For the last 55 million years, the pen-tailed shrew has survived on a diet consisting of beer.

How's that for an evolutionary bender?

The shrew lives in the forest of Malaysia and feeds on the flowers of the bertam palm. Produced year-round and constantly fermenting, its nectar is about 3.8 percent alcohol – roughly equivalent to a Sam Adams light.

"Fine," you say, "except that's a light beer!" But cut the shrew some slack – it doesn't eat anything else. Let's see you subsist on nothing but beer, light or not, and stay sober.

That's the shrews' most amazing quality: they don't get drunk. On any given night, said researchers in a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one-third of the shrews have a blood-alcohol level that would leave us under the bar – but there's no evidence of intoxication.

The findings suggest a highly-developed alcohol degradation mechanism; perhaps the insights will lead to human hangover treatments. And should the pen-tailed shrew ever be threatened by habitat destruction and climate change, the species can be saved by relocation American frat houses.

Chronic intake of fermented floral nectar by wild treeshrews [PNAS]

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Image: Annette Zitzmann*

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