2025-09-17 カリフォルニア大学バークレー校(UCB)
A chimpanzee at Ngogo in Uganda’s Kibale National Park in 2018, surrounded by one of their favorite foods — figs. UC Berkeley biologists measured the ethanol content of many types of fruit that chimps routinely consume and found that they contain substantial quantities — enough to suggest that the apes are chronically exposed to dietary alcohol.
Aleksey Maro/UC Berkeley
<関連情報>
- https://news.berkeley.edu/2025/09/17/in-the-wild-chimps-likely-ingest-the-equivalent-of-several-alcoholic-drinks-every-day/
- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw1665
- https://medibio.tiisys.com/112585/
- https://medibio.tiisys.com/95539/
野生チンパンジーにおける果実食を介したエタノール摂取 Ethanol ingestion via frugivory in wild chimpanzees
Aleksey Maro, Aaron A. Sandel, Bi Z. A. Blaiore, Roman M. Wittig, […] , and Robert Dudley
Science Advances Published:17 Sep 2025
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adw1665
Abstract
Human attraction to alcohol may derive from an evolutionary association between ethanol and fruits consumed by animals in nature. Fermentative yeasts are widespread in the terrestrial biosphere, and simple carbohydrates underpinning ethanol production are commonplace within fruits. We determined ethanol concentrations within fruits representing a substantial portion of the diet of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. Ripe fruit pulp from 20 angiosperm species in Côte d’Ivoire and Uganda contained an average value of 0.31 (± 0.21 SD) and 0.32% (± 0.20) ethanol (weight/weight), respectively, as scaled by annual chimpanzee feeding time per species at each site. Chimpanzees typically eat ~4.5 kilograms of fruit per day, corresponding to an estimated ethanol ingestion of 14 grams (±9), or the equivalent of 1.4 (±0.9) standard drinks by international standards. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that ethanol is widespread within tropical fruits and that modern predisposition to alcohol consumption derives from ancestral exposure to this psychoactive substance among frugivorous primates.
