96 bottles of beer a day, no matter how much you drink, you can't beat a hamster

After a few drinks at a party, you may feel dizzy and lightheaded. If you drink a few more bottles, you may even black out. Even people with a good alcohol tolerance will have immediate physiological reactions after drinking, such as red face, palpitations, and slow reactions.

But you may not realize that no matter how much you can drink, your alcohol tolerance is no match for a soft and cute little animal that is only the size of your palm and weighs less than 100 grams - the hamster.

A must-have for tough guys: drink wine like water

Hamsters are born alcoholics. If there is both water and alcohol in front of them, they will immediately forget about the water and drink the alcohol to their heart's content.

In 1962, researchers gave 23 Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) a choice of water or a 10% alcohol solution, and found that 88% of the liquid they drank in a day was alcohol and only 12% was water.

Syrian hamster | Dennis Blöte / Wikimedia Commons

Hamsters are also unique in their love of alcohol in the animal kingdom. In the same experiment, other animals tended to drink water instead of alcohol: hedgehogs drank only 36.3% of the alcohol solution they ingested, house mice drank 27.1%, and guinea pigs drank only 10.8%.

Animals' preference and tolerance for alcohol can be improved through breeding and medication, but hamsters don't need to be. They are born with a natural alcohol tolerance. Just buy a hamster from a pet store, put alcohol in its cage, and it will immediately let you know what a real alcoholic is. (But I strongly recommend that you don't try this!)

Hamsters not only love to drink, but they are not satisfied with low-alcohol drinks. In a 1994 experiment, scientists provided six hamsters with alcohol solutions of different concentrations and found that their favorite concentration was 20% to 30%, which is much higher than human beer and red wine.

Tons Tons Tons | Fantastic Facts

Small stature, big drinker

If hamsters are allowed to drink, their alcohol intake is amazing, and they can consume up to 17.9 grams of alcohol per kilogram of body weight per day. According to the hamsters' drinking, a 70-kilogram person who drinks 330 ml of 4-degree beer per can would need to drink 96 bottles a day - that is, 8 large boxes, and he would have to drink this much every day!

If there are other drinks, will the hamsters give up drinking? The researchers gave the hamsters a lot of choices, including tomato juice, sugar water, chocolate drinks, mango juice, and peach juice. The most effective ones are chocolate drinks and tomato juice, which can reduce the hamsters' alcohol intake to 6.3 grams per kilogram of body weight and 7.5 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, respectively. Other drinks did not even reduce the hamsters' alcohol intake by half. However, even after drinking chocolate drinks, the hamsters' daily alcohol intake is still very terrible, equivalent to a 70-kilogram human drinking 34 cans of beer a day!

Hamsters are so crazy about alcohol, probably because alcohol is high in calories. Each gram of alcohol contains 7 calories, which is about the same as fat (9 calories per gram). Researchers found that providing hamsters with calorie-containing sugar water can somewhat curb their alcohol addiction; but if calorie-free saccharin is added to the water, it will not fool the little alcoholics - they still drink for fun and ignore the saccharin water.

I drink drink drink | Ggeorgialeicester / Tenor

In previous experiments, chocolate drinks can significantly reduce the amount of alcohol consumed by hamsters, also because it has the highest calories among all the alternatives. However, scientists have noticed that if hamsters are provided with chocolate drinks and alcohol at the same time, they will choose both, drinking alcohol and chocolate from morning to night - not to mention C in the morning and A in the evening, they will drink C and A in the morning and evening, and never eat a regular meal again. So, losing weight is really difficult, after all, high-calorie snacks and drinks are hard for even hamsters to resist.

Never drink with a hamster

What's even more terrifying is that the little hamsters who drink all day can drink a thousand cups without getting drunk! Scientists tried every way to get the hamsters drunk, but found that the hamsters' alcohol tolerance is simply bottomless, and oral alcohol can hardly knock the hamsters down.

In 2015, in order to measure the degree of drunkenness in hamsters, scientists designed a "Wobbling Scale" with a score of 0 to 4. 0 points means that the hamster does not shake at all when moving, that is, there is no sign of drunkenness. 1 point means "wobbling when still or walking but not falling", and 4 points means "unable to get up after falling over."

When hamsters do somersaults, it's definitely not because they're drunk | giphy

In the experiment, Campbelli's hairy-footed hamsters (Phodopus campbelli) drank up to 7.5 grams of alcohol solution per kilogram of body weight in one breath, but their sway level was only 0.5 points, and they didn't even sway when they walked... Hamster: Drunk? Not happening!

In contrast, in a 2014 study, humans who took just 0.8 grams of alcohol per kilogram of body weight had significantly impaired motor coordination, and their chances of crashing increased significantly when they simulated driving. Our ancestors ate fermented fruits, and our tolerance for alcohol is already very good in the animal kingdom, but hamsters still cannot match humans.

Contempt from a hamster | Whiteh / Tenor

Why do hamsters drink so much?

Humans and other mammals, including hamsters, rely on two enzymes to metabolize alcohol: alcohol dehydrogenase and acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. Scientists have found that the activity of alcohol dehydrogenase in hamster liver cells is about twice that of rats, and their alcohol metabolism rate is also twice that of rats. If you compare hamsters and rats in drinking, when rats are drunk, it is just the beginning for hamsters.

The hamster fought harder and harder, but the rat surrendered early | Translated from reference [7]

There are ways to make hamsters drunk. If alcohol is injected into the abdominal cavity of hamsters, they will immediately collapse. When 2.5 grams of alcohol per kilogram of body weight is injected, they will become drunk and stagger, with a staggering degree of 2.8 points. It takes 2 to 3 seconds to get up after falling.

This is because alcohol injected intraperitoneally can bypass the liver and enter the hamster's blood directly before it has time to be broken down by enzymes, and then penetrate into their brains, making them drunk.

Stockpiling makes you a wine king

Hamsters' high alcohol tolerance is related to their habit of "hoarding".

Hamsters store a lot of food in their burrows so that they can survive the cold winter without leaving their homes. In order to move more food back to the warehouse each time, they have evolved a special sac-like structure on both sides of their mouths, called cheek pouches, to temporarily store food. The cheek pouches are very large and look round when filled with food, making the hamster's head twice or even three times larger than usual.

The food that hamsters store is mainly seeds and fruits of plants. During the storage process, they will ferment and produce alcohol. During the long winter, when hamsters eat their own stores, they will inevitably consume a lot of alcohol. For hamsters living in the wild, dealing with alcohol is already a common occurrence.

Hamster chewing pumpkin seeds | Mar lena / Wikimedia Commons

Hamsters' ancestors lived in the desert, where many foods were bitter. Previous studies have also shown that hamsters have a high tolerance for bitterness, which may make them naturally not hate the strong taste of alcohol. As for their love of alcohol and their strong ability to sober up, it is the result of natural selection - if they hate alcohol and become unconscious after consuming alcohol, then the food they have worked so hard to store will be inedible due to fermentation, and it will be difficult for hamsters to survive the cold winter.

Drinking? Small scene | PhillipScoville / Tenor

Although hamsters are natural alcoholics, we still do not recommend feeding your hamsters large amounts of alcohol.

Studies have shown that just as drinking affects the human biological clock, long-term drinking can also cause hamsters' circadian rhythms to be disrupted. Moreover, drinking can make hamsters fat. Over a 14-week period, if hamsters drink a 30% alcohol solution every day, they will consume 25% more calories in their diet, weigh about a quarter more than other hamsters, and grow more abdominal fat - if you don't want your hamster to grow a beer belly, don't let it drink.

References

[1]https://www.jsad.com/doi/pdf/10.15288/qjsa.1963.24.591

[2]https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03326758

[3]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/003193849500026F

[4]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037663571500056X?via%3Dihub

[5]https://www.cas.cn/kxcb/kpwz/201309/t20130922_3935677.shtml

[6]https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/12/alcohol-consumption-hamster-drunk/621125/

[7]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0091305779901217

[8]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031938486900703

[9]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheek_pouch

[10]https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/ajpregu.00268.2009

Author: Cat Tun

Edit: Flip

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