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![]() We found that these conclusions may have been premature and stories about elephants, and other mammals, becoming inebriated from eating rotting fruit may well be true. So they basically considered how much marula fruit it would take for us to feel intoxicated and then scaled up for an elephants size. One of the enzymes involved in breaking down of ethanol, alcohol dehydrogenase class 4, encoded by the gene ADH7, has a variation that makes us 40 times faster at metabolizing ethanol than other primates. ![]() Overripe wild fruits and nectars can have surprisingly high ethanol contents, similar to some pale ales. Even mammoths, an extinct elephant relative, did not have one. What the mammals that lost the ADH7 gene have in common is that they dont regularly eat a lot of fruit: their diets comprise grass (cows, horses, sheep and goats) and other foliage (beavers, elephants) or meat (dogs, sea lions, whales and dolphins). But its very unlikely that the efficiency with which they can do this is comparable to that of humans. Simply scaling up for body size does not accurately predict whether elephants can become intoxicated from eating old marula fruit. What they tend to have in common is that they eat a lot of fruit or nectar. For example, the aye-aye, a primate that is found on Madagascar, is known to drink the nectar of the travellers palm, which is speculated to be fermented. ![]() Instead of extrapolating from humans and anthropomorphizing animal metabolism, we need to consider the evolutionary history of each species and their diets.
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