Deceptive Caching When food is plentiful, animals often collect and hide extra food to eat when it is scarce. However, other animals may try to steal this stored food, and eat it themselves. To protect their food supply, some animals engage in deceptive caching. Using this technique, animals deceive other animals into thinking that food is hidden in one place, while it is actually hidden somewhere else. Deceptive caching tricks animals that try to steal food, making it harder for them to find the food supply. If their attempts at stealing food are repeatedly unsuccessful, the animals often become discouraged and stop trying to steal hidden food.
Okay. So there’s a good example of this. Recently a team of researchers was observing a certain type of squirrel, Eastern Grey Squirrels, gathering nuts for the winter. And of course, grey squirrels try to gather enough nuts so that they’ll have food to eat all winter long. And they dig holes in the ground and bury the acorns there.
But here’s what’s interesting: the grey squirrels don’t always put nuts in all of the holes they dig. If there’s another animal nearby that might want to eat the nuts, say, a bird, like a blue jay, the squirrel might dig a whole bunch of holes, but instead of putting nuts in all of them, the squirrel would just drop a twig or a stone in most of the holes, and only put nuts in a few.
But even though there aren’t any nuts in some of the holes, the squirrel will still go through the same process of covering these holes up with leaves and dirt as though they actually had nuts in them. So then a blue jay might find these holes and start digging in them. But since most of the holes only have a twig or a stone inside, the blue jay wouldn’t find a lot of nuts. So after a while, it’d lose interest and give up looking.
Explain how the example of the eastern grey squirrel illustrates the concept of deceptive caching.
Animals protect their food supply by deceiving or tricking other animals into assuming that the food is hidden in one place while actually the food is hidden in another place. A perfect example for this is eastern gray squirrels. This species of squirrels is gathering food to make sure that they have enough food supply in the winter time. They dig holes in the ground and put acorns in the holes. Interestingly, they don’t put acorns in all the holes. Instead, they put a twig or a stone in some of the holes and cover those holes with leaves and dirt just like what they would do when there are acorns in the holes. And then if a bird, say a blue-jay, finds one of the holes and starts digging, the blue-jay will find nothing but a twig or a stone. After this happens repeatedly, the blue-jay will lose interest and give up looking. In this way, the species of squirrels protect its food supply for the cold winter time.
