Photos Can't Trust Him
Feb. 21, 2008 -- Squirrels may be small and furry, but they're also clever tricksters, suggests a new study that describes how eastern grey squirrels engage in behavioral, and perhaps even tactical, deception. The study is the first to present evidence that any rodent deceives. It's also one of the first to document deception in the wild, since most other related studies have been conducted on captive critters. The free-living squirrels mislead to protect their stashes of nuts and acorns, which they store, or cache, for later consumption. When storing food, they first excavate a shallow pit that they dig with their front paws. Then, with the food in their mouths, the industrious squirrels push the item into the base of the pit "often with several thrusts of the entire body." Finally, they drag their paws over the site to cover it with soil and debris. Scientists, however, noticed that the squirrels would turn their backs on other squirrels and go through the whole storage ritual without even dropping food into the holes. "In deceptive caching, according to our definition, the animals cover over empty cache sites, or alternatively move a few meters away from a cached acorn and perform covering behavior," lead author Michael Steele told Discovery News. Steele, an associate professor of biology at Wilkes University, and his colleagues observed this hide-and-go-seek food deception among squirrels at Kirby Park in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Co-author Sylvia Halkin then led a second experiment on the campus of Central Connecticut State University. In the experiment, one person provided the squirrels with peanuts, a second monitored squirrel behavior and a third person actually pilfered nuts from the rodents. The findings are published in the current issue of the journal Animal Behavior. When the squirrels detected the human peanut pilfering, they initiated their deceptive behavior by covering sites where no food had been stored. They also made more of an effort to cache nuts in more remote places, such as under bushes and in tree nests, stumps or cavities. They even resorted to eating nuts rather than storing them. The squirrels did such a good job at digging fake storage holes that they often tricked the human pilferers, who had trouble finding the peanuts. Other squirrels, even with their heightened sense of smell, can also be foiled by the deception. Video: Nutria Hunted to Save Wetlands |
advertisement
Download Animal News at Bottom!
|
-
our sites
-
video
mobile
-
shop
-
stay connected
-
corporate
