Wasps can store alcohol unlike any other animal on earth.

One species of wasp, which often eats alcohol-containing foods, can retain alcohol at levels that other known animals cannot tolerate without causing side effects.

“This is crazy,” said study author Sofia Vucebuti of Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, Israel.

Oriental wasp diet (vespa orientalis) consists of ripe fruit containing nectar and grapes. This fruit contains sugar, which is converted to ethanol through natural fermentation over time.

While ethanol is highly nutritious for animals, it is also highly intoxicating. Even animals that routinely eat fermented fruit, such as fruit flies and shrews, cannot have more than 4% ethanol in their diets, Bucebuti and his colleagues say.

But when Bucebuti’s team fed the hornets nothing for a week other than various sugar solutions containing varying amounts of ethanol from 1 to 80 percent, the hornets seemed unaffected. Neither their behavior nor their lifespans changed. What makes this especially surprising is that a solution containing 80% ethanol contains four times the alcohol content of what occurs in nature.

“At first we experimented with only 20 percent (ethanol), and we were already surprised,” says study author Eran Levin of Tel Aviv University in Israel. The 80% ethanol figure is “even more incredible.”

Analysis of the genomes of several wasp species suggests that the insects have two to four copies of the gene that produces NADP+, which helps break down alcohol. Researchers think this may help explain why the oriental hornet, and perhaps other wasp species, can process such large amounts of alcohol.

These findings “remind us that we’re not the only ones who like alcohol,” says James Fry of the University of Rochester in New York. However, because data from other animal experiments are difficult to compare, researchers are not convinced that wasps are the only organisms that can process such large amounts of alcohol.

Eileen Stefanini of the University of Turin in Italy says wasps’ love of alcohol could give them a competitive advantage when eating nutritious fermented foods. She believes that the wasp’s resistance is probably related to the mutualistic relationship between the animal and fermenting brewer’s yeast. budding yeastAccording to her research, it resides in the wasps’ intestines, where they survive and even mate. Perhaps the wasp helps the yeast move from fruit to fruit, and the yeast helps the wasp find energy-rich food.