Party Animal

This is one party animal that can really hold its liquor: Researchers have found that the Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrew subsists on a diet roughly equivalent to 100 percent beer, drinking up the fermented nectar of the flower buds of the bertam palm plant. The nectar's alcohol content can go as high as 3.8 percent, but the animals never show signs of getting drunk.

The pen-tailed tree shrew, Ptilocercus lowii, a Malaysian critter that weighs only 47g but can drink the pound-for-pound equivalent of nine glasses of wine without any ill-effect when it sups on the alcoholic nectar of the bertam palm.

Pentailed tree shrews were described by scientists studying them as chronic drinkers with such a high alcoholic consumption that their habit would be likely to kill other mammals, including humans.