Despite get a brain that ’s slightly swelled than the size of a peanut vine M&M , squirrels have a fascinating , razor - sharp instinct when it comes to endurance . They know that acorns that are high in fat and sprout late are double-dyed for recollective - term storage , so theysalvage themfor winter and rust the less nutritionally dense livid - oak acorns mightily away . They also tend to think where they put their acorn stash rather than relying solely on olfactory perception . Like nature ’s perfect stunt performer , they can even come down out of tree diagram in a direction that denigrate physical harm . Now , researchers at the University of California , Berkeley have unveil a freshly discovered part of a squirrel ’s hoarding scheme , Atlas Obscurareports .
The researchers tail 45 wild fox squirrel on the UC - Berkeley campus for well-nigh two years . They made available to the squirrels four different type of nuts — walnuts , pecans , almonds , and hazelnuts . Sometimes the animate being were given a single type of orchis , and other times the nuts were mixed . Either way , the squirrel promptly sorted and stored their food for thought accord to eccentric — walnuts went in one hiding space , sweet almond in another , and so on .
This type of behaviour is known as " chunking " and makes it easy to retrieve datum in memory . In doing this , a squirrel wo n’t have to visit several different places search for pecans : They know just where the main supplying is . squirrel can stockpile up to10,000 nuts a year , so it ’s all-important for them to bonk which type of nut is where .
Thestudy , bring out inRoyal Society Open Science , also indicate that squirrels seem to empathise nuts have weight , choosing to carry heavier acquisitions to a different localization than lighter ball .
Squirrels being squirrel , they were well-chosen to be gifted an assortment of junky during the experiment , but there was one wrinkle : Rather than stash them off , sometimes they ’d just eat them on the spot .
[ h / tAtlas Obscura ]
