Oriental hornets can't get drunk | Hacker News Reader

Oriental hornets can't get drunk

economist.com

30 pointsioblomov34 comments

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https://archive.ph/oEH7n

Those poor hornets. Is there anything we can do to help them?

dose them with psilocybin and do studies to see what it does for their hostility towards other living creatures.

"You're not wrong, Walter. You're just an asshole."

I'm perfectly calm, Dude.

I remember the way we built wasp/hornet traps in the french countryside. Take a plastic bottle of water, cut it in two (top vs bottom), invert the top so the bottle opening is pointing toward the bottom, and fill the bottom of the bottle with wine.

Wasps and hornets are attracted by the wine, get in easily, then get drunk and apparently can't find their way out through the narrow bottle opening and die drowning in the wine.

Well I guess not those ones.

that works with water and sugar, I don't think that it's being drunk that's the problem, the liquid is just bait. It's probably just hard to get back to the hole? No space to fly, not easy to climb the inside of the bottle because of the shape (bottle top pointing down). Maybe being wet and sticky doesn't help either

Seems likely. That exact setup is also a (mediocre) fruit fly trap.

Lemonade works as well for attracting wasps.

Mosquito's are attracted to CO₂. Put ⅓ sugar, ⅔ water and yeast in the same container to lure them.

But do they also have multiple copies of aldehyde dehydrogenase, the next enzyme? Acetaldehyde is toxic and mutagenic.

According to the Interwebs, acetaldehyde's toxicity to insects is apparently less studied. Presumably these hornets can take it in stride.

It seems quite toxic in fruit flies if the hydrogenase has been disabled: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/096517...

So to get to OP's point, I am assuming that if the hornets couldn't detoxify acetaldehyde, then they would exhibit some sort of "hangover" even if it didn't kill them. But even the 80% ABV hornets seemed totally unaffected.

Mutagenic things are less of a concern when your lifespan is several months.

Any chance scientists can make a drug for humans to have this benefit? This could help in tense relationship building/ repair. You get the social bonding of pounding alcohol w/o the negative effects of drunkeness.

If there was such a drug you wouldn't get the social effects: these hornets don't get drunk at all, they metabolize the alcohol too quickly for it to affect their brains. It's not like they get a euphoric buzz without the social impairment :)

Some of the social effect is a placebo.

I witnessed this when I spent a month inside the offices of a large Japanese company in Kyoto. In that month there were three different dinners out for the whole office, all of them involving alcohol.

One of the engineers told me as an aside, because Japanese culture frowns on contradicting or questioning one's superiors, social drinking was a tacit mechanism where people could express their doubts about project direction and such without repercussion, as another part of the tacit rules were that what someone said while drunk shouldn't be held too strongly against them. Even after a few sips people would get more boisterous and the buttoned-down civility would drop. I didn't speak much Japanese so I can only imagine what was being said, probably something like "Boss, I'm not too confident that spending so much time adding the suchandsuch feature is worth delaying the project, but I'm just a junior engineer so I don't know what I'm talking about, hah hah. Kampai!"

In Vino Veritas! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vino_veritas

Many bars offer alcohol-free beers.

I've been on antibiotics for a week, so I haven't been drinking, but we had some alcohol-free beers left over from a party. They're all IPA-flavored, so they taste authentically awful!

Non-alcoholic beers have gotten really good in the last few years. In the US, Athletic Brewing Company is doing great stuff. I haven't tried their IPA, but their lagers and lighter beers are surprisingly good and an adequate substitute for the "ritual" of beer drinking.

I've tried their light beers, and didn't particularly like them.

Weirdly, even though I hate IPAs, I think I liked the alcohol-free IPA stuff better. It feels more "authentic", I think - likely because I don't drink IPAs, so I can't tell that something is off without the alcohol.

Try erdinger non-alkoholic “for sport”

https://us.erdinger.de/beer/non-alcoholic.html

For good mouthfeel !

"IPA-flavoured" is a bit dismissive. Alcohol-free beer is not flavoured water, it's beer that's had its alcohol removed. Non-alc IPA is an IPA with extra steps!

I meant to be dismissive in a joking way - I dislike the taste of IPAs, but they definitely taste Like Beer to me, even once the alcohol removal process has taken place. Athletic's light beers, though, taste off in a way that really doesn't work for me when I'm in the mood for the social aspect of drinking a beer, but not for most of the mental and physical ffects.

Removing alcohol is only one method. I prefer beers made with modified yeasts.

I didn't know that, interesting!

FWIW, drinking alcohol won't interfere with most modern antibiotics. The exception is metronidazole and related compounds, because they interfere with aldehyde dehydrogenase (leading to a buildup of toxic aldehydes, an intermediate compound in alcohol metabolism).

https://www.drugs.com/article/antibiotics-and-alcohol.html

So why have I always been told not to? I swear I remember reading that antibiotics and alcohol, combined, stress out the liver, but apparently that's not the case with Amoxycillin?

Anyway, I guess it's probably for the best to limit my drinking anyway. Except for Saturday at the party, which we shan't speak of, nor of Sunday morning.

While not an antibiotic, it also doesn’t play well with antifungals like terbinafine

There's Kava or Kratom - I've not tried them myself but I have heard good things about their ability to ease social situation like alcohol without alcohol's side effects.

Ketamine is interesting too.

Order club soda with a lime slice. It looks like a gin and tonic but you won't get drunk.

Will this lead to a new expression "Sober as an Oriental hornet"?

I'm a bit disappointed Wikipedia doesn't mention anything about this surprising physiological characteristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oriental_hornet

Interesting that these also have some static electricity features that are like those commented upon in a recent HN submission

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