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How Alcohol Effects Behaviour

The 70s punk singer turned DJ Tom Robinson introduces a song called ‘Rum, Thunderbird Wine and Coke’ with the following joke: “Scientists have managed to isolate a chemical in the brain which causes homosexual tendencies in otherwise straight men. It’s called alcohol.”

Or at least it always was a joke, until researchers at Penn State University in America managed to do exactly that. They were attempting to find out more about what happened to the brains of long term alcoholics by experimenting on fruit flies. Before their trials, flies had only been subjected to short term doses of ethanol, presumably because once you get them drunk, flies are very difficult to catch.

Armed with an especially large net, a team led by Kyung-An Han began to get the fruit flies drunk on a daily basis. This more closely mimicked the habits of chronic alcohol abusers and it turned up some very interesting results. Most importantly they found that male fruit flies which are generally a fairly conservative, heterosexual bunch, suddenly find it impossible to keep their wings off each other when subjected to a daily dose of ethanol.

And what is more, sobering up the next morning had little effect on the flies’ regard for one another. The more often they got drunk, the more they wanted to have their wicked way with each other. “If a behaviour like alcohol consumption becomes more pleasurable the more often you do it, you are more likely to keep doing it,” said Han.

Now anyone who has been called ‘darling’ by the town drunk after a heavy session on the Bacardi and cokes will tell you that this discovery hardly amounts to a revelation. However, it is important for scientists because it is the first time they have been able to demonstrated a physiological basis for the effects of alcohol on animal sexual behaviour.  

“Sexual behaviour is not determined only during an organism's development, but it also can be influenced by a post-developmental environmental factor; in this case, recurring exposure to ethanol,” said Han, sounding rather like all that ethanol had been getting to her too. “These findings represent the first demonstration of enduring behavioural changes induced by recurring ethanol exposure in a fly model.”