BERKELEY, Calif. — Some squirrels go a little nuts when it comes to sorting their acorns, a new study finds. Researchers at UC Berkeley observed the behavior of 45 nearby fox squirrels over a two-year period, finding that they use what’s known as a “chunking” behavior — organizing items into various smaller subsets in order to better manage the overall collection — to categorize their various nuts.
This is notable because humans also use chunking techniques, although generally for storing information, whether the data is of a spatial, linguistic, or mathematical variety. Taking your email, for example, and dividing the messages into various folders could be considered a form of chunking.
Fox squirrels use this strategy to divide the nuts they gather over a year — between 3,000 and 10,000 — into what the researchers term “subfolders,” one for each type of nut.
“This is the first demonstration of chunking in a scatter-hoarding animal, and also suggests that squirrels use flexible strategies to store food depending on how they acquire food,” says lead author Mikel Delgado in a university news release.
The researchers believe that this idiosyncratic behavior allows squirrels to both remember where specific morsels are, and to hide other treats from animals that could steal them.
“Squirrels may use chunking the same way you put away your groceries. You might put fruit on one shelf and vegetables on another. Then, when you’re looking for an onion, you only have to look in one place, not every shelf in the kitchen,” adds Lucia Jacobs, the study’s senior author.
These findings were discovered through the study’s principal experiment in which the squirrels examined were subjected to a variety of conditions relating to the locations and types of nuts provided. The authors provided the squirrels with almonds, pecans, hazelnuts and walnuts and monitored via GPS tracking where on the university’s campus the critters would bury their bounty during the two-year experiment.
To determine whether the way they were being fed mattered in the experiment, the authors gave some squirrels their nuts in organized rows of fours, while others were given them in a random order. Some were fed the nuts at the site where they last buried a nut, and some were fed at a fixed location.
The rodents, regardless of where they encountered or kept their nuts, were prone to separating them, even if they did so unconsciously.
“These observations suggest that when lacking the cognitive anchor of a central food source, fox squirrels utilize a different and perhaps simpler heuristic (problem-solving approach) to simply avoid the areas where they had previously cached,” the researchers conclude.
The full study was published last month in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
That’s nuts.
you crack me up…
Finally something useful out of UC Berkley. But where did the funding come from?
Antifa took up a collection because they heard it was related to squirrels..
“Chunking”? You mean sorting and storing?
Seriously, we can’t even talk about squirrels without getting political?
So, squirrels aren’t so squirrelly after all. Of course, they have nothing else to do except collect nuts and make little squirrels, so organizing their nut storage system is natural. If they had a Netflix subscription so they could binge-stream “Game of Thrones,” I bet their nut storage system would look a lot more like my wife’s clothing closet — complete chaos.
Hey they are smarter then the Democracts.
LOL. No surprise. These rodents are just like the useless Democrat Bureaucrats who study them.
Great article.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Bill Clinton is just another squirrel trying to get a nut.
Are they saving their nuts for some day?
They didn’t need a study to make these conclusions. I live on a protected oak sanctuary, and I have two huge birdfeeders.
I spend a fair bit on the best bird food you can buy, it consists of walnuts, pistachios, peanuts and smaller seeds like barley, thistle and others.
My property has the fattest birds and squirrels imaginable, I often see the squirrels use one hole for peanuts, some stash walnuts in other holes or in exposed knots in trees (We have four types of woodpeckers) and all of them raid the squirrels stashes if they try to store them in trees.
One time I noticed a mound on my front lawn, inside was a cache of only peanuts, so I watched the feeders and noticed this odd behavior of chunking.. My wallet also often gets chunked, high quality bird food isn’t cheap.
Maybe the squirrel’s are smart enough to know if they plant the peanut nuts and seeds they will sprout the next year and produce (grow) more seeds/peanuts. I also have a bird feeder and feed both birds and squirrels and watch them burry nuts and seeds. I have come to the conclusion that sometimes the squirrels forget where they burry seed and nuts and I have them sprouting up all over my yard and in my garden. This is probably how lots of trees and plants get started in the forest.
How much did I pay for this study?
I do lots of chunking with women. Those with great tits, ass, shape, I grade them and put them in different folders.
Care to share any of your worth while work!
Somebody ought to teach them how to dodge traffic
This is a critically important finding. We now know that we have to elect squirrels to govern us in order to make sure our nuts get saved…
Squirrels Use Sophisticated Technique To Separate Nuts By Type, Study Finds. You mean they actually taste them first? That’s deep.
As a resident of California we separate our nuts when we elect Democrats into office. Governor Brown is a walnut. He drives me up the wall. Pelosi is a coconut… she’s coo coo. Maxine Waters is a pea brain peanut.
My bear cub is looking at colleges now and I told him he cannot even consider CA based schools.
They are too crazy, too whacked out for an intelligent, logical, common sensical East Coast bear.
I have a beer fetish too. Oh… wait a minute.
Rocky the squirrel for Governor of California. At least a squirrel plans ahead.
Wow, I wonder how much of our tax dollars were wasted in this useless F-ING knowledge!?
you mad again, boy?