Aww, aren't they just darling? The tree shrew looks like a real-life anime character, all big, round eyes, adorable little paws and tiny mouth. If that thing spoke, it would have the squeaky voice of a preteen Japanese girl, and it would teach jaded sword-wielding teenagers the importance of nature through its precocious antics.
"Listen! Cocklebur can be fatal if fed to livestock!"
But the pen-tailed tree shrew isn't all cuteness and innocence. It's on this list because it eats only one thing: The fermented nectar from the bertam palm plant of Malaysia. This nectar is naturally fermented inside the plant to have an alcohol content of around 3.8 percent, roughly equivalent to one (cheap) human beer. Now, these shrews aren't the only animals on Earth that drink alcohol -- bats, birds, monkeys and many other creatures drink on occasion -- but we meant it literally when we said they consume only one thing: booze. That is their sole sustenance. They do nothing but get blasted, every hour of every day of every year of their lives. These guys spend an average of two hours a day doing nothing but drinking the bertam liquor, an amount roughly equivalent to about 10 to 12 glasses of wine for a human, all in one sitting.
The Kennedys of the wild.
1158 Comments