Techotic

Oh my! I’d never thought anyone could out drink me, but the Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrew looks like it could drink me under the table. A new study by researchers at the University of Western Ontario found that the tiny animal subsists on a diet roughly equivalent to 100 percent beer, subsists entirely on fermented nectar from the pertam palm plant, which can be as high as 3.8 percent alcohol. Even though, these tree shrews drink like there’s no tomorrow, amazingly, they don’t seem to get drunk.

“They seem to have developed some type of mechanism to deal with that high level of alcohol and not get drunk,” Lachance told LiveScience. “The amount of alcohol we’re talking about is huge — it’s several times the legal limit in most countries. So if we can figure out why these animals are able to cope with it perhaps it could be used to develop medicines to help people deal with alcohol poisoning.”

The discovery is particularly intriguing because the tree shrew is believed to be very similar to the last common ancestor of all living primates. The researchers hypothesize that this ancestor may have consumed alcohol at moderate or high levels, which could explain why humans have some tolerance for alcohol.

[via msnbc]