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<\/a><\/div>\n“Drunk” bats have no trouble flying under the influence, a new study says.<\/p>\n
Tropical bats of Central and South America regularly eat fermenting fruits and nectar. But they can fly and use their built-in “sonar” just as well while inebriated as while sober\u2014even with blood-alcohol contents that would exceed legal limits for people.<\/p>\n
“We went into the study fully expecting that some of the species wouldn\u2019t be able to hold their drink,” said study co-author Brock Fenton, a biologist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada.<\/p>\n
But “the bats, unfortunately, hadn\u2019t read the proposal,” he said.<\/i><\/p>\n
Read the National Geographic writeup<\/a> or the full article at PLoS ONE<\/i><\/a> – rest assured that the female bats were not visibly pregnant or lactating, and all bats got a chance to sober up before they headed home. The National Geographic story also has more pictures of Central American bats<\/a>, as well as other fun bat links sprinkled throughout its writeup. (Bonus: boozy shrew<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Drunk” bats have no trouble flying under the influence, a new study says. Tropical bats of Central and South America regularly eat fermenting fruits and nectar. But they can fly and use their built-in “sonar” just as well while inebriated as while sober\u2014even with blood-alcohol contents that would exceed legal limits for people. “We went […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[13],"tags":[53,120,183,458,822,941,1122],"class_list":["post-1866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pictures","tag-alcohol","tag-bats","tag-brock-fenton","tag-fenton","tag-national-geographic","tag-plos-one","tag-sonar"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4OKzG-u6","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1866"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5050,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1866\/revisions\/5050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/caitlinburke.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}