Do snails and slugs get drunk?

[Dumbledore]

I know that this is kind of a weird question, but I know that most of our little friends love beer, and it's a popular method of killing garden slugs by drowning them. I actually set a trap in my garden today but modified so they're captured and sit there drinking beer and munching on lettuce all day until I collect them, and I gave a few drops to my pet slug Sluggy, and he zoomed across the tank and sat down in the puddle and is still there. Do they like beer because of the alcohol or the yeast or what, and do they get drunk like an adult drinking beer, or hyper like a preschooler drinking Coke?

[muddydragon]

I would imagine they're after the yeasts. My guess would be that they would get drunk. I've seen a fair few drunk butterflies (we have a massive apple tree so a lot of apples go to spoil/ are destroyed on the drop down) and we make a huge pile of rotting apples which a variety of wildlife LOVES. The butterflies are the ones you see the most obvious inebriation effects on, they come and drink the fermented apple juice (nice and sugary!) and then flop over and generally flop around on the floor unable to achieve sustained flight (they do however eventually sober up. Oddly i've never seen a drunk wasp - probably because i don't hang around them for long!

[Dumbledore]

LOL!

[pinkunicorn]

I think they get drunk yes. Most if not all animals that can process ethanol (and don't die immediately) get drunk from it. And a lot of animals take the opportunity to feast on rotting fruit when they find it so I would imagine they find the effects just as enjoyable as humans do. Some mammals especially with developed enough memory to remember how they got drunk even seek out rotting alcoholic fruit! Snails and slugs have pretty good memories as far as food is considered so it's possible they could remember this, too. I was feeding some (eventually rotting) mango to wild slugs past two weeks and I noticed some of them had preference for the old and stinky mango bits instead of the fresher ones I offered. Those older bits almost certainly had alcohol in them by that time, since fruit gets boozy quite quickly.

[Dumbledore]

Wow.