There's a Logic To How Squirrels Bury Their Nuts (berkeley.edu)

sandbagger shares an announcement from the University of California: Like trick-or-treaters sorting their Halloween candy haul, fox squirrels apparently organize their stashes of nuts by variety, quality and possibly even preference, according to new UC Berkeley research... Fox squirrels stockpile at least 3,000 to 10,000 nuts a year and, under certain conditions, separate each cache into quasi "subfolders," one for each type of nut, researchers said... Over a two-year period, the research team tracked the caching patterns of 45 male and female fox squirrels as the reddish gray, bushy-tailed rodents buried almonds, pecans, hazelnuts and walnuts in various wooded locations on the UC Berkeley campus...

Using hand-held GPS navigators, researchers tracked the squirrels from their starting location to their caching location, then mapped the distribution of nut types and caching locations to detect patterns. They found that the squirrels who foraged at a single location frequently organized their caches by nut species, returning to, say, the almond area, if that was the type of nut they were gathering, and keeping each category of nut that they buried separate. Meanwhile, the squirrels foraging in multiple locations deliberately avoided caching in areas where they had already buried nuts, rather than organizing nuts by type.

Comments

Wilkes University PA study

[Anonymous Coward]

Cant cite a reference, but a local university where I live actually studied squirrels burying their nuts when they knew they were being observed vs. the opposite. It turns out squirrels, when knowing they are being watched will fake bury nuts and then move to another location and really bury the nut. Wilkes University- Wilkes Barre PA, Kirby Park squirrel study- an observation.

Re: Wilkes University PA study

[Anonymous Coward]

Cite? How about we cite these liberal univerisities for wasting tax dollars. This is why scientific research needs to be cut... Studying squirrels? What. The. Fuck.

Re:Wilkes University PA study

[MangoCats]

What the researchers did not uncover was the pattern of nut burying that the squirrels use to both store food and propagate the trees that bear the nuts. Over the course of millions of years, the squirrels and various species of trees have co-evolved to achieve an optimal re-seeding pattern by squirrel which protects the trees from both disease and wind damage.

Re:A great study

[alvinrod]

Although it seems kind of silly, you never know what you might get when you take a good look at nature. Nature is a cruel thing and it tends to favor more efficient solutions to survival. For as smart as humans can be, sometimes looking at the results of hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution can help to guide us in the right direction.