What do ground squirrel have in vulgar with ancient sailors , bees , birds , and sea turtles ? According to anew study , they have just been add to the listing of puppet known to navigate by the Sun .
Like all squirrels , Cape priming coat squirrels ( Xerus inauris ) temporarily store their food cache in several concealing place at once to undertake a bite at a late date . At the Kalahari Research Centre in South Africa , where these squirrels were study in the wild , there are n’t many obvious landmark such as tree diagram and bushes in the desiccated landscape to use as point of reference points , though . The investigator , from the University of Zurich ( UZH ) , found rather that the squirrel orient themselves using the Sun – which is almost always visible over the Kalahari – to conceal and then come back to their cache .
" The squirrels probably use the position of the Sun as the most important cue to roughly line up their direction of movement , " explain co - author Jamie Samson , from the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at UZH , in astatement .
To test this , Samson and co - author Marta Manser left out solid food for the squirrels to take . When they snap up the food and ran , they tracked them with a Global Positioning System and let out that the squirrels all moved in an almost straight line directly towards or off from the Sun at coherent azimuth Angle , which the author draw in their newspaper published inScientific Reportsas “ the slant of the Sun in relation to a fix reference , such as true north . ”
ness ground squirrel are sociable little creatures . Brittany Sumner / Kalahari Research Centre
" Based on this movement pattern , we dare that Cape ground squirrel use the attitude of the Sun at a particular metre of day as a principle of ovolo to regain their bearing when searching for a piazza to cover their food , " Samson said in the program line .
The researchers then coiffure up photographic camera near their hide stores and waited to see if the squirrel also used the Sun as a navigation prick to tame their cache ; they test this by recording the time of day they originally hid their food and then when exactly they returned to get it . It turns out the earth squirrels yield to their hoard almost exactly 24 time of day later – when the Sun was in the same situation in the sky as it had been when they first swallow up them .
However , what take a leak this study really interesting is that the squirrels were compromising with their schedule , sometimes take in before the 24 hours were up if they thought their stash was under threat from thieves – though always when the Sun mirrored the 24 - hour azimuth angle .
Although the author claim that “ to our cognition this is the first study on wild mammals to describe such strategic use of the sun in this way , “ they do note that “ a numeral of study have hint this cue has to be used in combination with other information , such as landmarks . ”
As the squirrels appeared able-bodied to recover food when the Sun was in a different post to when they sink it , mean they could be using other cues in conjunction , the authors conclude : “ We suggest that this tractableness may have evolved due to the high risk of caches being stolen , and beast have develop a problem specific scheme . ”
