currentsinbiology:

These Beetles Use Booze-Soaked Trees to Farm Their Food

You probably wouldn’t enjoy a home made of alcohol-soaked wood. But for ambrosia beetles, it doesn’t get any better.

These insects make a living by growing fungal “gardens” in dead, dying, or stressed trees. When trees are stressed, for instance by drought or flood, the plants produce ethanol as a chemical byproduct—which serves as a cue to these fungus-farming beetles that the plant might be ripe for invasion.

The insects first excavate networks of tunnels and galleries within these sick trees, often killing the host plant if it’s not dead already. Inside the tunnel walls, they plant fungal spores carried within their bodies and tend to the fungi, their sole source of food, says Christopher Ranger, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. (Find out whether alcohol can affect animals.)

The insects are so attracted to ethanol that in days past, there were reports of beetles boring into wooden casks, says Peter Biedermann, an entomologist with the University of Würzburg in Germany who, with Ranger, co-authored a new study about the phenomenon.

The creatures are also attracted to German beer halls, which Biedermann sometimes visits (for research purposes, of course). “Regularly in summer I [find] ambrosia beetles in the beer,” he says.