Going Batty

Scientists from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel are, unfortunately, cooperating with the Animal Uprising™. They are working to sober up the bats.

Bats often risk getting drunk off cocktails of alcohol that stew inside ripened fruit. And just as driving is dangerous for intoxicated humans, so is flying for boozy bats.

Now scientists find bats are savvy enough to dine on certain types of fruit sugar to help them get over the ill effects of alcohol. These findings could shed light on how wildlife deals with alcohol.

Bats make up one-quarter of all mammal species. Almost one-third of all bats live on the juices of fruits and the nectar of flowers.

Fruits such as figs and dates accumulate ethanol, or drinking alcohol, as they ripen. While Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) prefer such fruits when they are ripe, as little as a 1 percent concentration of ethanol is toxic for the bats. Even concentrations of less than 1 percent ethanol can make fruit bats sluggish against predators or hamper their ability to avoid obstacles. (For comparison, pale lager beers that most consumers are familiar with are typically 5 percent alcohol by volume.)…….

….Breath tests revealed that alcohol levels dropped faster after feeding on fructose-loaded meals than when given food containing either sucrose or glucose. They also found that as the amount of booze in food increased, the fruit bats preferred fructose-rich food more than glucose-laden food.

So the researchers are rescuing bats from the bat equivalent of skid row by feeding them sugar. And they have a bat Breathalyzer, too. (Did they get that off the shelf or did they invent that, too? What's it called? The Bat Breath 2000?) They're running a Betty Ford for bats there! Look, it's not our place to judge what drove the bats to drink in the first place. Maybe it was a bad home life, maybe it's genetic. But we'd prefer not to have even more sober bats flying about - they're more apt to get into trouble working for the animal overlords. The drunk ones just hit walls and fall down. Which suits us just fine.