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Hummingbirds Drink a Ton of Alcoholic Nectar, But Do They Get Drunk?

We are desperate to know whether we have drinking buddies out there in the animal kingdom.

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Humans have spent centuries wondering if we were alone in the universe. So much so that we like to ask that question in different ways across different subjects. We apply it to the existence of aliens, but we also apply it to dumber, more mundane philosophical questions, like, do other animals get drunk like us? We are desperate to know whether we have drinking buddies out there in the animal kingdom.

When it comes to chimps, yeah, it seems like it. How about bees? Yep, some of them are getting sh*tfaced. Flies are also getting wrecked on ethanol-rich food sources. And, thanks to some new research published in Royal Society Open Science, we can add hummingbirds to the list of animals we can have a beer with.

Hummingbirds Drink Alcoholic Nectar. So Why Don’t They Seem Drunk?

Scientists studying nectar consumption found that some flowers naturally contain small amounts of ethanol due to fermentation. It’s not enough to turn the forest into a dive bar, but it is enough to show that alcohol exposure is a routine part of some animals’ diets.

In controlled observations, Anna’s hummingbirds (that’s a species of hummingbird, not a hummingbird that belongs to a woman named Anna) showed a clear preference for nectar with very low alcohol content, around less than 1 percent. Their interest dropped as soon as the alcohol content increased. It’s not enough to get them drunk. They are moderate drinkers through and through.

The researchers were able to confirm that they were drinking alcohol by analyzing their feathers, detecting a byproduct of ethanol metabolism, ethyl glucuronide. This means that hummingbird bodies process alcohol in a way much like ours, with the big difference being scale and purpose.

Speaking of scale, hummingbirds consume an incredible amount of nectar every day, up to their full body weight and sometimes even well beyond that. That means even trace levels of ethanol can add up over time. Estimates suggest that their proportional intake of alcohol a day is roughly equivalent to a human drinking a small beer a day. The only difference is that hummingbirds need it to survive since it’s nearly constantly burning through its stockpile of calories just to stay alive, words we absolutely do not need, but do it anyway.

What’s still unclear is whether these low levels of alcohol have any effect on the hummingbird’s behavior or biology. The researchers suspect there might be trade-offs or benefits, but it’s going to take much more study to determine exactly what they are.

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