How Do Squirrels Find Their Nuts? | How Do Animals Do That?

it's the start of fall time for one creature to get busy the squirrel squirrels don't hibernate so they need to find then hide nuts to feed themselves through the cold winter [Music] incredibly a single squirrel can bury up to ten thousand nuts each year with no squirrel GPS and no X's to mark the spot locating all these nuts again months later seems an impossible task how do squirrels find their nuts [Music] squirrels can be found everywhere from deserts to tropical rainforests and in woods across America at the University of california-berkeley biologist and squirrel expert dr. Amanda Robin is more interested in what squirrels do before hiding their food she is taking her fancy squirrel test into the campus forest to find out how they choose their nuts and how they hide thousands of them in a way they can find months later hazelnuts and peanuts will lure the squirrels towards remote cameras allowing Robin an up-close view of their incredible not burying behavior and it doesn't take long for our nut layer to be sniffed out by our first bushy-tailed visitor but it doesn't grab and go first the nut is put through squirrel quality-control a quick sniff checks if it's rotten then a close-up inspection they're gonna turn it in their paws and they're checking for holes and cracks a cracked shell means it will rot in the ground no good for burying finally the shake test it's confirming that there's actually a seed in that pod and letting a rough estimated weight of that item once they find a perfect nut how do they choose a perfect hiding place most squirrels are scatter hoarders they hide their nuts over vast areas up to seven acres wide that's bigger than five football fields it's a huge area to find those nuts and even though their sense of smell is as good as dogs surprisingly they don't just simply sniff the nuts out squirrels are actually using a lot more memory than smell when finding their own buried nuts remembering the locations of up to 10,000 nuts I couldn't even remember where my car keys were this morning so how do they do it it turns out they use a kind of memory map imagine you're trying to come up with a great lunch spot in Manhattan it could be the best pizza is by Times Square and the tastiest Mexican might be a block past the grocery store on the right we use landmarks to help us find our way well squirrels do the same they're actually remembering where they are and building spatial maps that include landmarks of things around them like on top of that tree stump beside that bush so squirrels do have a kind of nut GPS it's just in their heads next they use an ingenious organizational strategy squirrels choose where to bury their nuts by what type of nut it is they might put all of their hazelnuts in one place and all of their peanuts in another place as a way to help them remember where those things are it's a bit like New York has Chinatown go there and you'll know there's lo mein go to Little Italy and you'll get great poster in the squirrel world its hazelnut Ville and peanut burg using their memory and mapping techniques these furry masterminds have a phenomenal 90 percent success rate recovering nuts it turns out squirrels really are nature's nutty professors space the final frontier and the deadliest a human would last only a couple of minutes without a space suit before suffocating and freezing to death in fact no earthly animal can survive these lethal conditions for long well except one creature it's the size of a grain of sand and it's called the tardigrade how does a pup survive in space three two why in 2007 the European Space Agency photon M 3 mission rocketed thousands of tiny tardigrades into space these eight-legged and strangely cute micro animals are nicknamed water bears because they butyl II live in water and if you really squint they look a bit like minuscule bears in their spaceship far far away from their home these tiny astronauts were exposed to the vacuum of space [Music] when they return to Earth to everyone's surprise nearly all of them were still alive but how turns out they survived by going into a unique form of suspended animation in the dryness of space their bodies water evaporates but the tardigrade replaces it with a protein it then shuts down everything except vital processes to keep it just alive in this state it doesn't move or breathe and that means it doesn't need heat or oxygen so the things in space that almost instantly kill us and all other animals don't harm them the only thing that can hurt the tardigrades in space is solar radiation that slowly cooks them away from a star it's possible they could live for decades you

Channel: Animal Planet

Views: 78,035

Rating: 4.8883862 out of 5

Keywords: Animal Planet, Animal Planet US, most intelligent animals, my cat from hell, Animal Planet full episodes, how do animals think, how do animals eat their food, gator boys, animal planet how do animals do that, crikey it's the irwins, robert irwin, smartest animals, grey squirrel, how do squirrels find their nuts, how do squirrels find their nuts in the winter, how do squirrels hide their nuts, squirrels eating nuts, squirrels eating nuts sound, squirrels favorite nuts

Id: NqdGlKbfUe4

Length: 7min 29sec (449 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 04 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

They look down.