The squirrel, master in the art of stock management?
by Yohan Residence 2 November 2017,
According to an American study, this small animal organizes its food reserves by categories of food, as we do at home for our fridge and other closets.
Squirrels are animals that like nuts such as almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts and other oilseeds. They are particularly known for their ability, not to say their relentlessness, to make provisions to spend the winter without worries of supply.
Mikel Delgado and Lucia Jacobs from the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, studied the behavior of the wild squirrel (Sciurus niger), a very common species in North America. For two years, the scientists duo proposed different provisions to a range of 45 squirrels. The provisions were given to them sorted by varieties (ex: 4 or 5 nuts), or mixed (ex: 1 hazelnut, 1 almond, 1 nuts ...).
You should know that squirrels can store each year near 10 000 nuts and more! The results published in the journal Royal Society Open Science 10 August 2017 (PDF in English / 6 pages) demonstrate that these animals are careful to carefully sort their provisions according to the variety and placing them in different hiding places, probably for to find one's way better This is not a coincidence when one considers such a number of commodities.
"We know that rats, monkeys, or pigeons use this technique of" chunking ", but this is the first time we see it in a species that disperses its food in hiding places. The idea is that by using this method, the squirrel decreases the amount of information it needs to remember and it allows it to better memorize it, "says Mikel Delgado.
Without a doubt, the squirrel is an expert in stock management and its organizational capacity is undoubtedly one of the most powerful of the animal kind!
http://sciencepost.fr/2017/11/lecureuil ... -de-stock/