If a hematophagous animal sucks some blood from a human who is high on marijuana, does the sucker experience any affects?
Tropes
That is going to depend on the concentration of psychoactive chemical (THC) that the bloodsucker takes in from your bloodstream (it’s going to be tiny) and whether the brain chemistry of the animal in question is affected in the same way by the THC as a human brain.
The first is going to depend on the amount smoked by the person, and how recently but is going to be milimoles at most, in absolute terms if it is an insect - they don’t take much blood from you. The second, is a question for a biologist. I don’t do field work!
I’m disappointed. I thought this was going to be a completely different sort of question… :eek:
First, it’s going to depend crucially on whether and how well the substance is absorbed by the animal’s digestive system. Remember, the bats and blackflies and mosquitos drink your blood, digesting it; they don’t give themselves a transfusion. For drugs that aren’t absorbed when swallowed, there’s going to be no effect at all on the feeder.
Then, of course, it depends on how the feeder is affected by the drugs. I doubt that psychoactive drugs would have similar effects on mammals and insects (leaving aside the question of to what extent insects can be considered subject at all to psychoactive effects).
Finally, there’s the blood levels of the drug in the victim and the volume taken compared to the feeders’ effective mass.
We can do a quick look at bats: Wiki says a vampire bat can weigh 40 g and consume 20g of blood in a night. Assuming that bat alcohol metabolism is similar to human’s (plausible), the proportional volume of blood it a bat is similar to the victim (unknown, but can’t be too far off), that all the drug is absorbed by the bat’s stomach/intestines (getting iffy), and that the alcohol isn’t excreted as the bat gets rid of all that extra water (more iffy, I think), then that means the bat’s blood levels would be about half of the victim’s.
That’s probably an overestimate, but even with the questionable assumptions, it seems at least plausible that, for instance, a human could be drunk enough to get a voracious bat tipsy, even if the bat isn’t as shnockered as the human victim.
I remember tests from the 60’s that showed the effects of LSD on spider web construction. I don’t recall any control studies about non-psychoactive substances (psychoactive in humans anyway) and their effects on web-building though.
Anyway, here’s an interesting video with some updates on that question:http://www.thedailybanter.com/tdb/2009/08/spiders-on-lsd.html
Thanks for the video link TriPole. I did however find this one to be more informative:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpK8UJ1DDsI regarding drug intake.
I never realized I was being filmed.