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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Hawaii worms hold
their booze the bestOne of the least known scientific facts in the whole world is that worms from Hawaii hold their liquor better than worms from England.
I will give you a moment to recover from your surprise. There. Better? It is quite shocking not only to learn that worms drink, but that worms from Hawaii are world-class imbibers. We hear all the time about how our beaches and air quality are the best in the world, but the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau apparently has been keeping this whole boozing Hawaii worm thing under wraps.
Actually, it's not really HVCB's fault. News of Hawaii's drunken worms only was recently released in the widely read and immensely popular science magazine Neuron. (I know I run to the mailbox daily, eager to get the latest edition of Neuron in my mitts.)
In the June edition of Neuron, researchers disclosed that they had been testing alcohol tolerance of worms because, well, somebody's gotta do it. I mean, do we really want to live in a world where drunken worms are sliming under the influence (SUI), careening around underground crashing into each other and nobody cares? At least, that's what I thought was going on until I got deeper into the story.
IT TURNS OUT that worms -- brace yourself -- don't naturally drink alcohol. They basically have to be forced to do it. And you can't believe how hard it is to entice a worm into a bar and get him to have a couple of shots of Jack Daniels.
I don't really know how the scientists got the worms all liquored up. I'd use a tiny funnel or offer two-for-one specials, but I'm no scientist.
In any case, they get all these different worms drunk, and they discover that "Hawaiian worms" were more able to recover from intoxication than worms from England. Now, I don't believe there are any "Hawaiian worms" in Hawaii any more than I believe there are "Haole worms," "Portuguese worms" or "Chinese worms." Worms are worms. What the scientists meant was that these worms were "from" Hawaii, worms that ended up in Hawaii from somewhere else, sort of "kamaaina worms," if you will.
Our island worms, apparently after a hard night of being force-fed tequila and Manhattans and singing "400 clods of dirt on the wall," sobered up faster than their English counterparts. They didn't throw up or anything. Maybe they did, but they're worms, so it was hard to tell. It could be throw-up, or it just could be, you know, regular old worm gunk.
Now we (finally) get to the reason getting Hawaii worms drunk is important. It turns out that they have a certain gene that gives them a tolerance to alcohol. That gene might one day be spliced into human DNA to help cure alcoholism and make the patients long and skinny and excellent diggers.
Just kidding. It actually just helps scientists figure out why so many humans become alcoholics and how to cure them. So, next time you have a beer, say a toast to our slimy little buddies who are getting sloshed for mankind.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com