Squirrels are “Rats with good PR”
More good PR for Squirrels … these destructive, invasive, nasty rodents. Squirrels are rats with fluffy tails.
Harvey Weinstein should hire the PR people for squirrels because they make a rat look cuddly.
Here they attempt to equate the vile squirrel’s ability to know acorns with the human ability to classify information. Uh huh.
(NOTE: If you think Blondie is rough on squirrels, you oughta hear her on “bunny rabbits” … that eat her flowers. YIKES! … She DOES like birds however; as our three designer bird-feeders and $100 bird seed bills attest. – BobLee)
Squirrels Use Sophisticated Technique To Separate Nuts By Type, Study Finds
Squirrels Use Sophisticated Technique To Separate Nuts By Type, Study Finds
BERKELEY, Calif. — Some squirrels go a little nuts when it comes to sorting their acorns, a new study finds.
Researchers at UC Berkeley observed the behavior of 45 nearby fox squirrels over a two-year period, finding that they use what’s known as a “chunking” behavior — organizing items into various smaller subsets in order to better manage the overall collection — to categorize their various nuts. (I am so glad that I did not pay for some kid to go to college to study squirrels for two years.)
A new study finds that squirrels are incredibly organized when it comes to saving nuts, using a “chunking” technique to sort them into ordered collections.
This is notable because humans also use chunking techniques, although generally for storing information, whether the data is of a spatial, linguistic, or mathematical variety. Taking your email, for example, and dividing the messages into various folders could be considered a form of chunking.
Fox squirrels use this strategy to divide the nuts they gather over a year — between 3,000 and 10,000 — into what the researchers term “subfolders,” one for each type of nut.
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