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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