Booze Saves Lives?

Well, it can if you're a fruit fly larva, anyway.

Fruit flies eat different kinds of fungi from rotting fruit -- which shows that they have a great marketing department in snagging the name "fruit fly" instead of other possibilities -- and in so doing they sometimes consume the fermented products that accompany said fruit. You wouldn't think they have enough of a brain to get much of a buzz on about this, and it is possible for them to take in too much alcohol-saturated food and poison themselves. So why would they have a preference for fermented rotting fruit instead of non-fermenting rotting fruit?

Seems as though a nasty breed of wasp will lay its eggs in fruit fly larvae and then wasp larvae will grow inside their insectoid cousins by feeding on their innards. The fruit fly larvae will die in a manner not dissimilar to the folks unlucky enough to encounter the title character in the Alien movies, although not quite as spectacularly. But alcohol works its own brand of nastiness on the wasp larvae, in a fatal and very grotesque fashion that more or less involves the li'l wasper's innards becoming its outards in a, shall we say, highly moving manner.

So first off, the wasps are less likely to lay their eggs amongst fruit flies that are partying it up at the local saloon (suggested name: Fermento's Hideaway). After all, you don't want to leave your offspring hanging around with a lot of drunks. Secondly, fruit flies infected with wasp larvae show a preference for alcohol-tainted food because it tends to kill off the little parasites before they consume their hosts from the inside.

And there you have it. Booze can in fact save your life, if you have a brain the size of a fruit fly's anyway. I've never tried this myself, although in the days in which I imbibed, I recall visiting more than one place where one ordered strong drinks as the best way to ensure that one's glass was relatively germ-free.