Everyone knows that war can tear a man’s soul apart, sending him running for the bottle. But what about animals?
Todd Schlenke, an Emory University biologist, and his team of researchers discovered that at least one species of fruit fly self-medicates with booze. Drosophila melanogaster has been fighting its own war with tiny parasitic wasps for so long that it will intentionally seek out fermenting rotten fruit whenever one believes it’s been infected.
In most cases, it works. Feeding on alcohol that’s often stronger per volume than beer induces fetal alcohol syndrome in their parasitic wasp larvae, causing the little bundles of terror to shoot their internal organs out of their anuses. Talk about rot-gut, knowwhatwemean? In fact, fly schnapps is so strong that even adult wasps “laid 60 percent fewer eggs, possibly because of the fumes wafting from the food.”
But, that was one species of wasp. Another, Leptopilina boulardi, is capable of drinking toe-to-toe with D. melanogaster. And they lose only 10 percent of their eggs to fly booze. This leads us to only one conclusion: if evolution is an actual thing, then it is creating the mother of all drunken bar fights over child custody.