Monkeys and Beer: The Surprising Connection
The life of a modern day monkey
Sometimes when we get completely off our face, we might act like a monkey. But what happens when monkeys and beer mix, and the monkeys themselves get drunk?
Well, there have been two recent studies that delve into monkeys and beer, where scientists provided monkeys with massive quantities of alcohol—all for free! Bastards! Yes, this is what scientists are up to these days. Lucky monkeys, you might say. But anyway, let’s take a closer look at these very important studies about monkeys and beer.
STUDY NUMBER ONE: The search for the ‘alcohol gene’
Scientists have discovered that monkeys, just like the humans, those other primates, also have developed a taste for alcohol – and behave in a similar fashion when under its influence.
St Kitts islands
Research on St Kitts Islands
Research into their drinking habits was carried out on the Caribbean island of St Kitts on a group of green Vervets. The Vervets were introduced to the island in the 17th century when they were brought over with slaves from Africa. St Kitts was chosen for the project because the wild Vervets had established a liking for alcohol from the fermented sugar cane lying around aplenty in the fields of the rum-producing island. In their hunt for alcohol, they’ve learned to steal alcohol from bars, hotels and napping tourists. Scientists are using the monkeys – which share 96 per cent of their genetic make-up with humans – to help to search for clues to the nature of human drinking and to discover whether some people have an alcohol genes in their hereditary makeup.
See Video (might be blocked in some countries, drat!)
Categories of Monkey Drinkers
The scientists took 1000 vervet monkeys and plied them with alcohol, kept them in a social group and directed research into their drinking habits. Leading the experiments were Frank Ervin, a professor of psychiatry, and Roberta Palmour, a professor of human genetics, both from McGill University in Montreal.
Unfortunately for the monkeys the experiments were not set in the local pub but in controlled cages, where they were given a choice of non-alcoholic, diluted alcoholic and neat drinks. They found that the monkeys’ drinking behaviours were oddly similar to humans: that the animals split into four core categories: binge drinker, steady drinker, social drinker and teetotaller
The Four Drinking Categories
Social drinkers: The majority of the monkeys, drank in moderation and only when they are in the company of other monkeys and not before lunch, prefer their alcohol to be diluted with fruit juice.
Regular drinkers: Fifteen per cent of the monkeys were regular drinkers and prefer their alcohol neat or diluted with water not sweetened or watered down with fruit juice: Funnily enough steady drinkers do very well in social groups, and are good leaders. They keep order well and they’re very dominant. This type of alcoholic monkey is a very efficient animal. In human terms Winston Churchill perhaps!
Teetotallers: Fifteen percent of the monkeys prefer little or no alcohol. Bastards!
Binge drinkers: Five per cent are classed as “seriously abusive binge drinkers”. They drink fast, fight and devour as much as they can until losing consciousness. As in humans, most heavy drinkers are young males, but monkeys of both sexes and all ages like to drink. If this group has unobstructed access to alcohol, they will drink themselves to death within 2/3 months. What makes them different to the regular drinkers is not the quantity of alcohol intake, both can be high, but in the way they drink, their drinking patterns.
The Impact of Alcohol on Monkeys
So what does this experiment prove? Prof Ervin said: “The parallels between the Vervets’ behaviour and human behaviour are striking. A cageful of drunken monkeys is like a cocktail party. You have one who gets aggressive, one who gets sexy, one who thinks everything’s funny and one who gets really grumpy. The binge drinkers gulp down the alcohol at a very fast rate and pass out on the floor. The next day they do it all over again.”
On the piss
So just like humans, monkeys abuse alcohol, and suffer all the negative effects that booze can bring to society – idleness, violence, theft, no frills sex, and the rest. Additionally, the study shows vervet monkeys’ alcohol use has a genetic component. For many years, alcoholism in humans was thought to be purely a learned behaviour — the result of environmental factors. But this study, and others like it, indicate that in humans, alcohol addiction has a genetic component: it has a tendency to run in families. Daddy monkey passes it down to the little ones.
Man is said to have started drinking alcohol in prehistoric times when scouring the forest for sweet fruit, man liked what he tasted when the fruit fermented and reacted with natural yeasts. Is this one reason why we developed our brains, developed a creativity and deep understanding of life? Is this how first early music/paintings started? Or dare I say it religion. I mean you have to be off your rocker to believe in talking snakes and the like. Is it only a matter of time before the Vervets start penning some tunes? Maybe the scientists could have given them some typewriters when they were crammed into them cages? Only saying like!
STUDY NUMBER TWO: Boozing adolescent monkeys’ reveal how binge-drinking harms the adolescent brain.
Binge drinking is increasing amongst the youths, and new research has shown long-lasting damage to an important area in the brain after excessive alcohol consumption, suggesting binge drinking could seriously affect the memories of adolescents. Post-mortems of binge-drinking adolescent monkeys have produced the best evidence yet that heavy drinking at an early age can do lasting damage to the brain. Monkey and human brains develop in the same way, so the finding suggests that similar effects may occur in human teenagers.
The Focus of the Study
Scientists and a team of researchers at the Scripps Research Institute at La Jolla, California led by Chitra D. Mandyam intended to determine the negative effects of binge alcohol consumption on the hippocampus area of the brains of adolescent macaque monkeys. The hippocampus, not hippopotamus, is necessary for short and long term memory, impulse control and ability to make decisions. The hippocampus is moreover a place where the adult brain can produce new brain cells.
The Experimental Process
The research team observed a group of seven male adolescent monkeys. They gradually increased the alcohol intake from 1% to 6% over the first 40 days. This approach aimed to get the monkeys drunk while studying their brain development. After 40 days, the researchers switched three monkeys to non-alcoholic drinks. The other four continued to receive the 6% alcohol brew for an hour each day over the next 11 months
The Results: How Alcohol Affects the Brain
“Monkeys love to drink. They’re like humans,” Mandyam says. These four monkeys were intoxicated daily, reaching a fairly high blood alcohol level (BAL) of 0.1 to 0.3 (about 10/12 bottles of beer). In the last two months of the research, they stopped receiving alcohol. After 11 months of alcoholic cocktails, the researchers dissected their brains for examination. Nice.
The results revealed a dramatic decrease in stem cells in the hippocampus region of the binge-drinking monkeys, along with reduced development of new neurons.
“You’re messing with brain plasticity,” Mandyam said. “When adolescence subdues these cells, the chances of producing normal brain cells later in life decrease. It’s very devastating to see how binge drinking harms the brains of adolescents.”
“What is important for the public to know is that this type of drinking can kill off stem cells.” This loss could result in damage to memory and spatial skills, she adds. Mandyam thinks that this degeneration could have long-term effects and provide a mechanism for why bingeing teens are more likely to develop alcohol dependence as adults. “It’s also important to recognize that binge drinking may produce adverse consequences on the brain regardless of age.”
Hangover cure?
Since monkeys’ brains closely resemble human brains, researchers believe that the study’s findings likely apply to human adolescents as well. Regular binge drinking in adolescents might cause severe, long-lasting damage to the neural stem cells in their brains. This damage could lead to memory problems and potentially contribute to mental illness. The research suggests that the long-term negative effects of binge drinking on adolescent brains could be even more serious than previously thought.
To be clear, these monkeys consumed roughly 10-12 bottles of beer daily, every week for nearly a year. DAILY! That’s quite a caveat! No wonder their brains turned to mush!
Ethical Concerns and Reactions
Also animal welfare groups condemned the experiments. Plying animals with alcohol in the name of science is irresponsible the argument goes. Better than as part of meal or a new coat? Could be worse me thinks. I am also guessing that if they had asked to use humans they wouldn’t have had a problem finding willing participants for an experiment like this, all in the name of advancing science,
EDMUNDO!
Edmundo and monkey
Of course when someone mentions monkeys and alcohol to me I immediately remember Edmundo, the “Animal”, the nutcase who used to be play football and was a regular for the Brazilian national team.
The striker threw a party in Rio for his son’s first birthday, hiring a chimp and two elephants from a local circus to boost the fun. Edmundo personally experimented by giving the monkey beer and whisky, nearly killing it with alcohol poisoning. When a paper published pictures of this, it landed him in hot water. Animal rights groups erupted in fury, leading to his court appearance, a $1,000 fine, and narrowly escaping six months of prison time.
Sources and Links:
R.M. Palmour and F.R. Ervin.
Chitra D. Mandyam, Michael A. Taffe, Roxanne W. Kotzebue, Rebecca D. Crean, Elena F. Crawford, Scott Edwards
Use Facebook to Comment on this Post
Latest posts by Rob Nesbit (see all)
- The Imperfect Individual Speaks - September 8, 2024
- Hell Raiser *1 Boris Yeltsin - August 25, 2024
- Running as an Independent with Mary Fitzgibbon - July 18, 2024
- Zombie nation: Irish European and Local Elections Review - July 7, 2024