Urban Squirrels, How Much Are We Disturbing You?
Anti-aristarchus writes:
There is one city famous for building bridges across city streets, so the squirrels do not get run over. But no one took a survey before. Story at Phys.org. (Why, I have no idea. It is figuratively driving me nuts.)
Human disturbance in urban environments makes some squirrels fail, but others perform better in novel problem-solving.
Unlike natural environments, urban areas have artificial buildings, traffics, less greenery and, most prominently, more humans. Despite these seemingly 'harsh' or stressful characteristics, some wildlife like the Eurasian red squirrel have chosen to settle down in urban environments, and they thrive. Urban wildlife often show higher behavioral flexibility and increased ability to solve novel problems, and thus can exploit new resources. However, which characteristics of urban environments influence animals' performance, and their relative importance, have remained unclear.
In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a research team led by Itsuro Koizumi of Hokkaido University set out a novel food-extraction problem for wild Eurasian red squirrels in 11 urban areas in Hokkaido, Japan. This problem contains out-of-reach nuts on levers, and the successful solutions are counterintuitive: a squirrel has to push a lever if it is close to a nut, whereas it has to pull a lever if it is far away from the nut.
The researchers also recorded the environmental characteristics in each area, including direct human disturbance (mean number of humans present per day), indirect human disturbance (the number of buildings), green coverage, and squirrel's population size, and then correlated these with squirrels' novel problem-solving performance.
Ah, symbiosis, where we unwittingly train the rodents to be smarter than us, with the inevitable unpleasant outcome. All hail the squirrel named Caesar!
Longview, Washington, for those too lazy to google or duck-duck.Journal Reference:
Characteristics of urban environments and novel problem-solving performance in Eurasian red squirrels, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2020.2832)
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