Comment by kelnos
7 hours ago
Do they hoard unnecessarily, or do they hoard what they need to get through winter months, without much surplus?
7 hours ago
Do they hoard unnecessarily, or do they hoard what they need to get through winter months, without much surplus?
They hoard instinctively. They can't count; they don't have a sense of "this is enough."
They hoard until it gets too cold, then they hibernate/hunker down until it gets warm.
Squirrels don't really hoard in the sense trillionaires do ("gathering a great quantity for one's own private collection"), they take seeds and bury them all over the place, which is meaning #2 in the dictionary ("save in one's mind for a future need or use"). The squirrel and other animals eat them later, the 50+% nobody finds to eat can take root. That way, squirrels play an important role in seed dispersal for many species of tree.
I suppose the trillionaire analogy would be they themselves investing money.
I remember reading recently that it had been disproved that squirrels can actually remember where they bury all their nuts and seeds. Maybe some, but quite a lot they cannot.
They end up eating food buried by other squirrels as well as their own.
you're splitting hairs. Squirrels evolve to save more food for themselves, everything else is an accident
I've heard that a lot of trees are grown from forgotten squirrel seed stashes. So at the very least they do store more than they eat.
And over the long term it compounds to more food for their descendants through the buy and forget investments (the trees that sprout out of the stashes).