So Long & Thanks For All The
Drunken Fish.
Can fish get drunk? Yes, apparently. They’re more likely to become anti-social daredevils when the alcohol is mixed with energy drinks, according to a paper published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. A team of researchers discovered this when conducting experiments with zebrafish. They doped up a group of 192 zebrafish …
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I'm afraid that experiment has been done, repeatedly, in Glasgow. Buckfast Tonic Wine is a pretty good substitute for any of the aforementioned mixtures; it contains sugar, ethanol and caffeine in stupid proportions, premixed.
Not for nothing is "Buckie" locally known as "Wreck the hoose juice".
everyone in the diet-science world loves to blame caffeine! (whereas I rely on it to stay awake - the world can be a really boring place, sometimes)
found this on teh intarwebs a long time ago: "It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shakes, the shakes become a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion."
I should try the alcohol and taurine thing, though, just to make sure. You know, taurine is named 'that' because it comes from beef, right? So alcohol and a nice steak? Or maybe Tequila and an energy drink?
Perhaps you're thinking of cysteine. The body synthesizes taurine from cysteine and it is a major component in bile. It has a neurological effect that, if I recall correctly, suppresses the nervous system in some way so I believe it's used to control the shakes one would get with lots of caffeine as found in energy drinks.
As an aside, it's also the thing which makes cats strict carnivores as they are unable to synthesize taurine and must therefore get it from their diet.
We've studied this in the west of Scotland for decades. The Catholic abbey of Buckfast in Devon produces an alcohol/caffiene brew called Buckfast Tonic Wine which it uses to poison the Protestant working class in and around Glasgow. I have my tongue in my cheek but barely.
Buckfast: a drink with almost supernatural powers of destruction
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/27/buckfast-drink-with-supernatural-powers-destruction
Alcohol makes many lustful and aggressive. Which is great because it also makes anyone fall unconscious. Caffeine keeps you awake, and the worst drunk is an insomniac, energetic drunk.
Anecdote.
I was tricked into handling a west coast councils BACS transfer of employee wages that coincided with an Orange walk. I'd been employed partly to repair old mainframe terminals, partly to introduce PCs - none of their computer department had ever used a PC! I had never used a mainframe, and I had never experienced an Orange walk. All the operators and managers had declined, so I was volunteered.
I had stupidly got drunk the night before so I was handling a hugely important operation hungover alone the next morning not at my best, but I was fairly confident because I'd been walked through the procedure and it was fairly simple, more tedious than challenging.
Then the Orange walk started. I never actually saw it because I was inside working all day but I can describe it. 16 unmusical bands marching around my building playing six tunes continuously for six hours, blasting sectarian songs that got progressively more drunken and out of tune while being cheered on by a huge crowd who descended the evolutionary ladder with each rotation.
There were idiots standing on the very high smoked window sills of our operations room, so high that wouldn't be safe if they were sober, and the awful music, the hateful shouting and my throbbing hangover were making changing the tape reels and typing in the arcane instructions increasingly difficult.
At one point I turned on the radio for some relief from the chaos outside, Radio 4, spoken word, very quiet. One of the nutters on the window sill took offence, banged on the window and told me, "Turn aff that fuckin music or ah'll pan in these windows and slash ye".
The idiot parade finished before I finished, but when I left and locked up I looked down this long, posh street and the entire road was covered with broken green glass from all the Buckie bottles.
Caffeine is an antidote to alcohol, not a supplement.
Add alcohol to the tank and they get drunk. One of the great scientific discoveries. Certainly not the work of childish PhD students..... maybe they can get a research grant to study the whole range of intoxicants and the whole animal kingdom, so that nobody has to unexpectedly face the terrible wrath of an LSD crazed budgie.
I, for one, think the effect on LSD on budgies has been seriously understudied. They probably get to the top of high buildings and think they can fly.
https://www.sciencealert.com/spider-on-drugs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_psychoactive_drugs_on_animals
I'll have you know that a friend of mine decided, many years ago, to find out just what a drunken duck looked like. This was on the campus of York university, an area of land reclaimed from bog. It consists of artfully landscaped fields and ponds, with the zen-like landscaping effect being largely ruined by 60s architecture and undergraduate students. Many turn to alcohol to numb the anti-aesthetic effects of this mixture.
So, one afternoon Phil decided to experiment on the local ducks, using a supply of cheap vodka and some extremely ancient bread crusts to absorb the alcohol. The local ducks, being made of sterner stuff than most avians, took to alcoholic breadcrust with great gusto, and soon filled up on it.
The effects were interesting. A drunken duck has trouble balancing, but is so low to the ground that falls don't hurt. It also has difficulties with walking in straight lines, but can swim perfectly happily, albeit in looping circles rather than straight lines. The flight characteristics of drunken ducks were not tested, mostly because Phil was laughing too much to even attempt to get this duck into the air.
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Good call. Additionally "Zebrafish are omnivorous, primarily eating zooplankton, phytoplankton, insects and insect larvae, although they can eat a variety of other foods, such as worms and small crustaceans, if their preferred food sources are not readily available."
They don't eat fish.
Caffeine is a stimulant, alcohol is a depressant*. Together they make trouble.
Or to put it another way, don't mix uppers and downers.
(And yes, this is why Bucky can have such an effect. It's good stuff in moderation though, just the thing for livening yourself up before a gig).
*(In the technical sense that it inhibits part of your brain)
Zebrafish are himalayan natives and always smaller than three inches. Oscar fish are indeed originally from South America, but there are feral populations in places including China, and they can grow to well over a foot in size.
Unsurprisingly, Oscar fish happily eat little fish like zebras. How natural it is probably depends on point of view.
Coming next: Research into correlation between attitudes regarding fish predation by non-native species, and readership of the Grauniad / Daily Fail........
So that's what happens when zebrafish are subjected to alcohol and so-called energy drinks. It tells us nothing about what happens when humans ingest that combination.
If someone else did this they could and should be charged with animal abuse, which is what it is. When someone claims to do it as science they get published and money for yet more "research." What a sick scam.