Fox squirrels use ‘chunking’ to organize their favorite nuts
From Berkley.edu
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.Read more: http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/09/12/nut-chunking/The study, published today in the Royal Society Open Science journal, is the first to show evidence of squirrels arranging their bounty using “chunking,” a cognitive strategy in which humans and other animals organize spatial, linguistic, numeric or other information into smaller more manageable collections, such as subfolders on a computer.
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.
“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,” said study lead author Mikel Delgado, a post-doctoral researcher who conducted the study along with UC Berkeley psychology professor Lucia Jacobs.
I always knew there was a method to their madness. My dog also has a logic when hunting these things.
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Awesome! Great Tip! Thanks for sharing and great post! Cheers from Mexico!
That's Nuts!
I never knew that squirrels were so organized. They would have made great Marines!
They could have been REMFs in the rear organizing the gear!
It is all about organization, men!
Thanks for your sharing and great post.
They are birilient one ! thanks for sharing !!
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Great News :]
That's interesting. I like fox and regular squirrels. However fox squirrels occur more in Delaware than here in New York. Fox squirrels are also less social than regular grey squirrels.