My esteemed colleagues and I were having lunch when we came upon the subject of turning the sea into beer. If this happened, could fish survive? Well, presumably there is enough dissolved oxygen in beer to enable the fish to breath, since it’s mostly water. However, the fish might die of alcohol poisoning. Except of course if it was a really big fish. It would just have to spend all of its life blitzed out its mind.
Anyway, I decided to enlist the help of my brother over at the University of Cambridge, since he’s a big zoology guy these days. He wasn’t certain of the answer, so I suggested to him that he should pop down to the lab with a pint of Grolsch and throw a goldfish into it. But apparently this counts as a vivisection experiment, and you have to fill in a thousand Home Office forms, lest the old ladies in Felcham and outraged crypto-hippies get annoyed.
If there was a pet shop on Finchley Road, I’d simply go and buy a goldfish and take it to the pub, but there isn’t. What I’m trying to ask is whether any of you have ever immersed a fish in beer, and if so, what were the results. Alternately, does anyone know if it is possible for a fish to survive in beer?
Thank you.
Any fish will die quickly in beer, even a very large one. The alchohol will travel into the fish’s bloodstream through it’s gills much more quickly than the fish’s liver can remove it, and the fish’s bloodstream will soon pick up an alcohol content comparable to the alcohol content of the beer. The fish will die of alcohol poisoning. A large fish will merely take a little longer to die. No need to kill a goldfish to determine this.
Since beer is ~5% ethanol, it’d take about 20 fold more beer to kill half the fish. That works out to ~2-3 ml/L over 96 hours. Goldfish might last longer than bluegills, but they’re not likely to survive long in anything aprroaching pure beer.
Why don’t we all just try it this weekend? We need to make sure that everyone uses the same kind of beer. I suggest chilled Kronenbourg 1664. Although I’m not certain how easily available it is in the US. Maybe we’ll have to lower ourselves to using Budweiser in the interests of scientific rigour. Let’s try it with different kinds of fish to compare.
There’s really no need for an experiment here; CO[sub]2[/sub] in solution is at saturation; the gill structures will not be able to lose CO[sub]2[/sub] to the water, the fish will die by asphyxiation (unless some other factor offs it first).
I submit that in full immersion in beer, a fish will survive for less time than a drunken human; perhaps that would be an interesting experiment… any volunteers?
Um, I know for a fact that a goldfish does not survive long in beer–just a couple of minutes. You pretty much have to drink the fish down as soon as you drop it in the bottle.
I spoke to a friend of mine who when stoned at a friend’s house earlier this year decided to try this experiment. He took a goldfish out of the fish tank, dropped it in a pint and it died. He’s unable to tell me how long it survived for as he had that spaced-out perception of time that weed causes. He thinks less that two minutes.
His friend was pissed off about the fish’s death though.
Years ago a friend and I were in a bar and we just happened to have a couple of goldfish with us. Both goldfish ended up in a glass of beer. They started to turn belly up after about one and a half minutes. We took them out and put them into a glass of water. One died, we named the other Bob. The beer was cold and I think this had some influence.
Research question: Is carbon dioxide more toxic than ethanol?
Hypothesis: The difference in fish survival times will be greater between flat beer and fresh beer, than the difference in survival times between low alcohol beer and high alcohol beer.
[NOTE: Death is operationally defined as cessation of motion, since the guy at the pet store said he’d call the cops when I asked for a fish plethysmograph]
Procedure:
Obtain 100 bottles of a low alcohol beer, and 100 bottles of a high alcohol beer.
Obtain 200 goldfish.
Obtain 200 friends with stopwatches. To avoid confounds in the experiment, all fish must be tested at the same time…
Wouldn’t the alcohol itself be damaging to the fish’s tissues? I mean, in the long run, assuming you had beer oxygenated enough that the fish wouldn’t suffocate on the CO2 within a minute or two.
Ranchoth, I think AndrewL said that that would happen to a fish (so did several other posters, but I wanted to keep the number of bolded words smaller :D)