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.
The take away – squirrels are smart. What did this study cost?
I keep my nuts to myself
THE SQUIRRELS ARE CHECKING TO SEE IF THE NUT IS ANY GOOD OR NOT. A HEAVY NUT MEANS NO WORM OR BUG HAS EATEN THE NUT. SQUIRRELS ALSO LAY OUT NUTS IN A GRID PATTERN. THEY DO THIS BASED UPON HILLSIDES, FLAT LAND AND WATER. SQUIRRELS ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR NEW TREE CREATION. SO THEY PUT THE RIGHT NUT, IN THE BEST SPOT, TO GROW THE RIGHT TREE, FOR THAT AREA! NOT ALL NUTS ARE PART OF THEIR WINTER HOARDS. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK A SQUIRREL HUNTER! THEY ALSO MOVE FROM HOLLOW TO HOLLOW TO CUT NUTS. SOME TREE’S THEY DO NOT CUT THE NUTS. THE GRAY SQUIRRELS ARRIVE FIRST, USUALLY ABOUT 20″ TILL SUNRISE. FOX SQUIRRELS ARRIVE LATER. THE GRAY SQUIRRELS ARE ENERGETIC AND BARK A LOT. FOX SQUIRRELS ARE MORE SHY AND LIKE TO LAY ON LIMBS AND CUT. FOX SQUIRRELS SELDOM BARK. GREY SQUIRRELS ARE AGGRESSIVE. THEY ALSO RUN OFF FOX SQUIRRELS. THEY GO INTO THE NESTS OF FOX SQUIRRELS AND BITE OFF THE TESTICLES OF YOUNG FOX SQUIRRELS. WHEN THEY CUT, THE GREY SQUIRRELS CUTTING SOUNDS LIKE RAIN FALLING. WHEN A FOX SQUIRREL CUTS, HE CUTS QUIETER AND SLOWER, THAN DOES A GREY SQUIRREL.
So will squirrels be called bigots now because they are prefer some nuts over others?
A sample size of 45 is nowhere close to being statistically significant. They need samples from all over, thousands of them, in order to determine whether the phenomenon is localized, unique, or universal.
All Squirrels are rats with bushy tails.
Not all of them have bushy tails – some of them have no tail at all.
Dang it! Just when I had convinced myself that I was more highly evolved than squirrels, this comes out.
Pretty soon squirrels will invent the wheel.
Well , that’s just NUTS!
Squirrels in my area use a highly sophisticated binary mathematical system for grading and storing their nuts. A 1 means take it. A 0 means leave it. It’s uncanny! After a five year study I’ve discovered squirrels use a binary system just like early human software coders.
How much Taxpayer Money was wasted on this project…. Too much I bet
Great contribution to mankind. Well worth the money spent.
It’s a little unfair to tie these researchers with the antifa nitwits and a$$wipes, Berkeley hosts two ROTC units and site of the former Manhattan Project. A quick google will show their contribution to science and technology for this country can not be overstated.
I keep my nuts in my pants. That way I always know where they are.
My dog just murdered a squirrel the other day. I protected him from the authorities by disposing of him in the Monday trash pickup.
Not that it isn’t interesting to learn things about animal behavior and abilities, but it must be great to have a career that pays you to study nearby squirrels.
Does anyone have a recipe for squirrel sausage?
1st you start with a .410 ,20 or 12ga. shotgun… add shot shells to taste
The Moral of the story … Squirrels know the difference in nuts & Numb Nuts do studies on why squirrels are smarter than them.
Is anyone else sick of watching tax dollars go to Lefty and Commie-infested public schools where they conduct “research” like this? These same schools sponsor outrageous anti-Western garbage as well that produces students and faculty that hate the civilization that made them possible.
…that’s nuts.
I take pecans away from squirrels… and make them cry!