Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. It is Saturday,
Speaker 1: so we have a vault episode for you. This is
Speaker 1: going to be more squirrels eating meat than I think.
Speaker 1: The original publishing publication title was Squirrels the Return. This
Speaker 1: originally published one to twenty twenty five. This is where
Speaker 1: we're picking up on a topic we discussed in past
Speaker 1: episodes about research into to what degree squirrels eat meat
Speaker 1: and do they hunt well?
Speaker 2: Find out.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, the production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 3: My name is Robert liamb and I am Joe McCormick,
Speaker 3: and today we are coming at you with the return
Speaker 3: of Squirrels to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Are newer
Speaker 3: to the show and your memory does not go back
Speaker 3: this far? What year was it? Was it in twenty
Speaker 3: eighteen that we did a pair of episodes on squirrels
Speaker 3: that turned out to be real fan favorites, and I'll
Speaker 3: say host favorites too. We think about squirrels quite often,
Speaker 3: and I've never really thought about them the same way
Speaker 3: ever since we did those shows.
Speaker 1: That's right, they were quite popular talking about squirrels, their history,
Speaker 1: human and squirrel interactions and what exactly squirrels eat.
Speaker 3: Yes, one of the big revelations from our research hall
Speaker 3: for those episodes it was about well, I don't know.
Speaker 3: I was going to say the darker side of squirrels,
Speaker 3: but I don't know. It's not dark, it's just nature.
Speaker 3: It's it's the more violent side of squirrels, the more
Speaker 3: carnivorous side of squirrels. The thing most people don't think
Speaker 3: of when they think of squirrels, which is scavenging meat
Speaker 3: from dead animals, attacking baby birds in their nests, maybe
Speaker 3: even preying on their own kind, some kind sometimes just
Speaker 3: squirrels eating of the flesh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And a lot of this breaks down just
Speaker 1: to the basic idea that squirrels are more complex then
Speaker 1: a lot of people give them credit for. You know,
Speaker 1: they it's easy to look at a squirrel and think, oh,
Speaker 1: that's cute, without of course realizing that this is a
Speaker 1: wild animal. And yeah, they're not pure herbivores either, as
Speaker 1: we discussed in those episodes. But the thing about those
Speaker 1: episodes is that I think for many of us, they
Speaker 1: made squirrels a lot cooler because if you did kind
Speaker 1: of dismiss squirrels as just Oh, well, they're the these
Speaker 1: pre We see them every day. They're mundane, you know,
Speaker 1: they're out there trying to eat the bird seed. They're annoying,
Speaker 1: but that's it. You know. It gave us maybe a
Speaker 1: little more room to appreciate them, and a part of
Speaker 1: our appreciation that grew out of that is we busted
Speaker 1: out I think two different T shirt designs for our
Speaker 1: T shirt store. We don't promote our T shirts store
Speaker 1: or as much as our T shirt store would like
Speaker 1: us to, in part because we don't depend upon it.
Speaker 1: It's just for fun. But if you go to our
Speaker 1: tea public store, you can find a link at stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Yourmind dot com or check out the link
Speaker 1: tree on our Instagram. At STBYM podcast, you'll see I
Speaker 1: moved them up to the top so you can see
Speaker 1: them rather easily. We have one that is the Squirrels
Speaker 1: are Not what they seem and the other one is
Speaker 1: scug King of Rats. These are both squirrel shirts. They're
Speaker 1: both kind of metal looking. They're pretty good designs. I
Speaker 1: think people had some fun with.
Speaker 3: Them, agree. But there have been recent developments that caused
Speaker 3: us to return to the issue of squirrels once again.
Speaker 3: Multiple listeners over the past few weeks have excitedly gotten
Speaker 3: in touch to share news reports about a scientific paper
Speaker 3: out just this month in the Journal of Ethology, which
Speaker 3: returns to the topic of squirrels eating meat, and not
Speaker 3: just eating meat, but hunting and killing prey. So one
Speaker 3: of these messages, for example, came from our listener Daniel.
Speaker 3: He provided a link to the paper and said, predatory
Speaker 3: carnivorous squirrels observed for the first time. Love the show.
Speaker 3: Ps there's a Mountain Goats album called Beat the champ
Speaker 3: and it is entirely about lucha libre no synth though
Speaker 3: off topic for today, but good to know. Nonetheless, Thank you,
Speaker 3: Thank you, Daniel. So if you are Daniel or any
Speaker 3: of the other listeners who sent this this news our way,
Speaker 3: thanks for letting us know. And yep, you got your
Speaker 3: way here we are talking about it.
Speaker 1: We may have heard from a few other listeners over
Speaker 1: the years too, occasionally sending in Some squirrel news I
Speaker 1: have found in combing through the squirrel news since twenty
Speaker 1: eighteen is that generally squirrels make headlines when there is
Speaker 1: blood involved. Yeah, so we'll be touching on a few
Speaker 1: different shades of this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, warning that today's episode will include some gory details.
Speaker 3: But it's all nature, folks, and we got to face
Speaker 3: nature at some point, that's right. So what was found
Speaker 3: in this new predatory squirrel research. Well, let's go straight
Speaker 3: to the paper and have a look. So this paper
Speaker 3: has a long list of authors, but I'm going to
Speaker 3: read their names today. So this is by Jennifer E. Smith,
Speaker 3: Joey E. Ingbritson, Mackenzie, M. Minor, LC oh Striker, Mari L. Podas,
Speaker 3: Tia A. Rivara Lupin, mL tell Us, Jada C. Wall,
Speaker 3: Lucy M. Todd, and Sonya Wild. And the paper is
Speaker 3: called Vole Hunting Novel Predatory and Carnivorous Behavior by California
Speaker 3: Ground Squirrels, published in the Journal of Ethology twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: As I said, I think it was out just this month,
Speaker 3: in December twenty twenty four. And so actually I think
Speaker 3: this paper is really interesting because it's not just a
Speaker 3: documentation of a surprisingly violent behavior being carried out by squirrels.
Speaker 3: I mean, that's kind of that would be an interesting
Speaker 3: thing if that's all it were, but it actually places
Speaker 3: it within some some bigger theoretical framework about mammal behavior.
Speaker 3: So the authors begin by talking about ways that animals
Speaker 3: adapt to their behavior to respond it changes within their environment.
Speaker 3: Sometimes we can have this misconception that humans are really
Speaker 3: the only animals that can adapt substantially to changing pressures
Speaker 3: in the world around them, and that all of the
Speaker 3: other animals are well, you know, they're not as smart
Speaker 3: as us, and their behavior is produced by a system
Speaker 3: of fixed instincts that are fundamentally rigid, so they just
Speaker 3: can't really change very much, even if it would benefit
Speaker 3: them to do so. Now, I think it's true that
Speaker 3: humans are especially adaptable. The flexibility of human behavior is
Speaker 3: really one of the things that makes us special in
Speaker 3: the animal kingdom and allows us to survive in basically
Speaker 3: any climate or ecological situation. But I think sometimes the
Speaker 3: knowledge of our specialness in this regard can lead us
Speaker 3: to underestimate the fascinating behavioral flexibility of other animals, especially
Speaker 3: other mammals, even superficially unassuming mammals like squirrels. So just
Speaker 3: because we're really good at something doesn't mean other animals
Speaker 3: can't do it at all. And as one kind of
Speaker 3: illustration here, early in the introduction of the paper, the
Speaker 3: authors bring up a really interesting animal behavior concept that
Speaker 3: I don't believe I had ever heard of before. If
Speaker 3: I had heard of it, I'd forgotten about it and
Speaker 3: by the time I read this. But the concept is
Speaker 3: called the ecology of fear, and this is a bit
Speaker 3: of a tangent from the main paper here, But I
Speaker 3: thought this was so interesting I wanted to get into
Speaker 3: it in some detail. So one of the references they
Speaker 3: cite introducing this idea of the ecology of fear is
Speaker 3: a paper from the Journal of Mammalogy published in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety nine by Brown, Landrei, and Gurung called the Ecology
Speaker 3: of Fear Optimal Foraging, Game Theory and Trophic Interactions. What
Speaker 3: the authors of this paper point out is that it's
Speaker 3: easy to have an oversimplified view of how the presence
Speaker 3: of a predator can impact prey availability within an area.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to make up an example, and this
Speaker 3: scenario might not be perfectly valid in nature for the
Speaker 3: specific animals I'm using, but this is just to illustrate
Speaker 3: the principle. So imagine you've got like a little park
Speaker 3: area and a bunch of rabbits living spread out across it,
Speaker 3: and they are being preyed on by a band of
Speaker 3: local foxes, and you're studying the predator prey interaction between
Speaker 3: the rabbits and the foxes. And then suddenly a new
Speaker 3: predator is introduced into this local environment. It's a cougar,
Speaker 3: and the cougar eats rabbits too. The foxes and the
Speaker 3: cougar both compete for the rabbits. So how does the
Speaker 3: cougar affect the availability of food for the foxes. A
Speaker 3: simple way of thinking is that the cougar kills and
Speaker 3: eats some of the rabbits. Thus, some of the rabbits
Speaker 3: are removed from the population. Thus the number of rabbits
Speaker 3: available for the foxes to hunt is reduced. But the
Speaker 3: authors here point out that reality is more complicated than that.
Speaker 3: In the example I made up, the cougar might eat
Speaker 3: some of the rabbits, but the actual number that it
Speaker 3: kills and consumes compared to the total number of rabbits
Speaker 3: relatively small. And yet the presence of the cougar could
Speaker 3: still greatly impact the availability of rabbit prey for the foxes. Now,
Speaker 3: how would that be. It would be because, as the
Speaker 3: authors of this nineteen ninety nine paper say, quote, mammalian
Speaker 3: predator prey systems are behaviorally sophisticated games of stealth and fear.
Speaker 3: So what they're saying here is that prey mammals are
Speaker 3: not inert resources that are consumed like cookies from a jar.
Speaker 3: These are cookies that react. You know, they react to
Speaker 3: the fact that they are being eaten, and they are
Speaker 3: two varying degrees depending on the species adaptable. They can
Speaker 3: change their behavior in response to a threat. So the
Speaker 3: authors say that when studying predator prey interactions in nature,
Speaker 3: there's actually a spectrum of different kinds of systems. So
Speaker 3: at one end of the spectrum you would have what
Speaker 3: the authors call population driven systems, and then at the
Speaker 3: other end of the spectrum you have what the authors
Speaker 3: call fear driven systems. In population driven systems, the main
Speaker 3: dynamic is predators killing prey, So the main variables are
Speaker 3: going to be like the number of predators and the
Speaker 3: number of prey, how many prey animals the predators eat,
Speaker 3: Whereas in fear driven systems, the presence of predators creates
Speaker 3: a condition of fear among prey, which causes prey to
Speaker 3: become harder to catch. So, to go back to our example,
Speaker 3: if you have a cougar suddenly show up in this park,
Speaker 3: it could cause the rabbits to become significantly less available
Speaker 3: as prey, not just because they're literally disappearing from the
Speaker 3: population by being eaten, but because the rabbits are becoming
Speaker 3: more vigilant and more cautious. They're venturing out of shelter less.
Speaker 3: They might change what times of day they do things.
Speaker 3: They might change their foraging strategies. They might hide more
Speaker 3: or move away from any suspected predator more earlier, earlier
Speaker 3: in possible detection. So, in reality, a predator can functionally
Speaker 3: deplete the supply of prey animals in an area, not
Speaker 3: just by eating them, but by frightening them.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: I can't help but imagine a scenario where it's Gotham City, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and maybe you're the local police force, and you you
Speaker 1: have various stakeouts in place, you have various pending cases
Speaker 1: and so forth, and then there's a batman, essentially a
Speaker 1: new super predator preying on the criminal population of the city.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's going to potentially interfere with everything that
Speaker 1: was going on. It's going to change the local criminal ecology.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, it'll change. Like police joker interactions, not just
Speaker 3: because all of your local jokers and riddlers have been
Speaker 3: put in Arkham Asylum, but they might actually stop doing
Speaker 3: crimes or something, or do them in a in a
Speaker 3: less easy to detect way. Yeah, for another not quite perfect,
Speaker 3: but I think interesting analogy. I was thinking just about
Speaker 3: supply and demand in human economies. When you have a
Speaker 3: lot of people who want to buy the same product,
Speaker 3: and that product is in limited supply, the buyers can
Speaker 3: end up limiting access to that product, not just by
Speaker 3: literally buying up and hoarding all of the products that exist,
Speaker 3: but by the secondary effect of driving up the price.
Speaker 3: Sellers realize demand is high, They're like, oh, a lot
Speaker 3: of people want to buy this, So the sellers raise
Speaker 3: their prices as much as they can, and this limits
Speaker 3: access to the product, even though the product doesn't actually
Speaker 3: vanish from the market, is just too expensive for a
Speaker 3: lot of the people who want it. Similarly, I think
Speaker 3: you could think of a predator as a predator by
Speaker 3: its presence bidding up the price of prey. It's not
Speaker 3: that the prey animals no longer exist. Some of them
Speaker 3: don't exist anymore, but for most of them, they're still there.
Speaker 3: But they are increasingly expensive to a qui because they
Speaker 3: adjusted their behavior in response to a predator, and so
Speaker 3: the authors of this nineteen ninety nine paper summarize the
Speaker 3: effect by saying behavior buffers the system. A reduction in
Speaker 3: predator numbers should rapidly engender less vigilant and more catchable prey.
Speaker 3: The ecology of fear explains why big, fierce carnivores should
Speaker 3: be and can be rare in carnivore systems ignore the
Speaker 3: behavioral game at one's peril. So how does this tie
Speaker 3: into the study about squirrels where well, the authors of
Speaker 3: this twenty twenty four paper cite the ecology of fear
Speaker 3: as an example of how prey animals, including squirrels, are
Speaker 3: not well modeled by thinking of them as rigid, inflexible
Speaker 3: machines or as like a you know, just an innert
Speaker 3: resource like cookies in a jar. Instead, we should understand that,
Speaker 3: to varying extents, squirrel species and other mammalian prey can
Speaker 3: change their behavior patterns when different pressures appear in surprising
Speaker 3: or perhaps even alarming ways. But mammals like squirrels don't
Speaker 3: only change their behavior in response to the threat of
Speaker 3: a predator. They also alter their behavior in response to
Speaker 3: changes in the availability of food. So from here the
Speaker 3: authors go into a big catalog of let's talk about
Speaker 3: all the documented instances of squirrels, specifically, in their case,
Speaker 3: the California ground squirrel eating meat. That's where they're going
Speaker 3: from here. And so they end up citing a paper
Speaker 3: that we talked about extensively in our older series on
Speaker 3: squirrels from twenty eighteen. The paper is called Squirrels as
Speaker 3: Predators by J. R. Callahan, published in The Great Basin
Speaker 3: Naturalist nineteen ninety three. You remember this one, Rob, Oh, absolutely, yeah.
Speaker 1: And of course if you're reading any subsequent papers about
Speaker 1: squirrels as predators, they all cited this one. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: seemed to be a major publication in the world of
Speaker 1: squirrel predator research.
Speaker 3: Really seem to do the legworking cataloging all these different
Speaker 3: examples not just of squirrels eating meat, but actually functioning
Speaker 3: as predators. Now, there's an important distinction to make here,
Speaker 3: which is the difference between what you might call it
Speaker 3: just standard predation versus what is called facultative predation. An
Speaker 3: animal is generally categorized as a predator if it needs
Speaker 3: to be a predator if it can be expected to
Speaker 3: catch and kill prey as a regular part of its
Speaker 3: behavior across its geographic range.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially in the case of obligate carnivores. You know
Speaker 1: where it has this creature has to hunt. Meat is
Speaker 1: what it eats.
Speaker 3: But also, I think you can think of some omnivores
Speaker 3: as just straight up predators if predation is a regular
Speaker 3: part of their acquisition of food. Meanwhile, a facultative predator
Speaker 3: is an animal that can sometimes optionally engage in predation
Speaker 3: if the circumstances are right. And that's what we're looking
Speaker 3: at with squirrels. I'm not aware of any squirrels that
Speaker 3: are consistent obligate predators, but there are a bunch of
Speaker 3: squirrels where the evidence is pretty good that while they
Speaker 3: are primarily herbivores, they will be omnivores when they need
Speaker 3: to be. And that's you know, the occasions might be rare,
Speaker 3: but many of them will shift strategies to eat foraged
Speaker 3: meat and sometimes even actively catch and kill live prey
Speaker 3: on an as needed or as available basis. Now this
Speaker 3: came up in our older episodes, but Callahan lists a
Speaker 3: bunch of different squirrel prey animals from the literature just
Speaker 3: to gloss over them quickly. This includes birds, frogs, rats, lizards, rabbits, gophers, moles, snakes, fish, voles, ducks,
Speaker 3: wild turkeys, turtles, crabs, and salamanders. And sometimes this would
Speaker 3: this eating would involve the eating of the flesh, eating
Speaker 3: the meat. Sometimes it seems to be focused more on
Speaker 3: bones or joints, possibly for mineral supplementation in some squirrel species.
Speaker 3: But if you look at all of the previous research
Speaker 3: on squirrel predation taken together, it emphasized that the vast
Speaker 3: majority of the hunting done by squirrels was targeted at
Speaker 3: first of all insects or invertebrates. And then if you're
Speaker 3: looking at vertebrate prey, it would be relatively helpless juvenile
Speaker 3: prey such as actually eggs like bird eggs or bird
Speaker 3: hatchlings in the nest.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so memory serves this paper and also a paper
Speaker 1: that I'll be referring to later, looked at the fact
Speaker 1: that when you're studying all this, Yeah, you do have
Speaker 1: reports of squirrel predation and squirrels eating meat and so forth,
Speaker 1: But then also you have a lot of data that
Speaker 1: has arrived at via analyzing the stomach contents of harvest squirrels,
Speaker 1: and of course that data doesn't all provide a lot
Speaker 1: of context, Like you can look at it and say, well,
Speaker 1: they still mostly eat seeds or plants or whatever, but
Speaker 1: there's a amount of meat. As to how that meat
Speaker 1: was obtained, you have to draw conclusions sometimes because yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there there. Of course, you can scavenge, you can
Speaker 1: take out prey that are just weak or helpless, juvenile
Speaker 1: and so forth. But then there is that threshold, right
Speaker 1: that you cross into potentially actively hunting prey, actively hunting
Speaker 1: something that is that is not like wounded or dying,
Speaker 1: but is to some degree like a like a valid,
Speaker 1: healthy prey creature.
Speaker 3: That's right, And to some extent this ambiguity remained up
Speaker 3: until the time of this new paper. So the authors
Speaker 3: describe the landscape of squirrel meat eating research before their
Speaker 3: paper as follows. They write, quote, despite the growing consensus
Speaker 3: that many squirrel species opportunistically consume meat, much of the
Speaker 3: early evidence for predation is based on stomach contents or
Speaker 3: the killing of heterospecifics in captive settings e g. Zoos
Speaker 3: or traps. This makes it challenging to distinguish between scavenging
Speaker 3: and direct predation. So this is what you're saying, Rob.
Speaker 3: We're in this situation where you can find squirrels and
Speaker 3: like cut open their stomachs and say, oh, there's some
Speaker 3: meat in there, but we can't tell did it actually
Speaker 3: kill something, or did it just find something dead and
Speaker 3: eat part of it, or in these other cases, you
Speaker 3: might have evidence that the squirrel did kill and eat
Speaker 3: an animal, but it was an animal that was like
Speaker 3: caught in a trap or something.
Speaker 1: Right, And I want to add an important caveat here
Speaker 1: about predation. I don't want to make it sound like
Speaker 1: true predation is a fair fight. We've covered enough examples
Speaker 1: of predation in the past to know that there are
Speaker 1: plenty of obligate carnivores, obligate predators who are still They're
Speaker 1: obviously not going to go out and say all right,
Speaker 1: show me the strongest of the pack. No, the one
Speaker 1: I shall fight today. No no, no, there's still they're
Speaker 1: still going after off weekend, young old and so forth,
Speaker 1: because they are inherent increased risks involved in going after
Speaker 1: stronger prey.
Speaker 3: Predators use their coupons, they are looking for the super
Speaker 3: savior options. Yes, oh, but anyway, the authors here continue quote,
Speaker 3: the direct study of hunting behavior by squirrels remains rare,
Speaker 3: and most reports in field settings are still limited to
Speaker 3: a single depredation event. So one thing this does bring up.
Speaker 3: I've seen a few people kind of comment that like, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, this isn't new. We have examples from before
Speaker 3: of squirrels eating meat, or squirrels, you know, report isolated
Speaker 3: reports of squirrels killing and eating animals. That is true,
Speaker 3: we do have these reports. But what this new study
Speaker 3: contributes is extensive direct documentation, including video footage, of a
Speaker 3: specific species of squirrel, in this case, the California ground
Speaker 3: squirrel or Odospermophilus beachyi, hunting, killing and eating adult vertebrate
Speaker 3: prey animals voles in the study. So how is this
Speaker 3: different than what we had before. Well, it's just a
Speaker 3: lot more observations of the predation behavior compared to the
Speaker 3: previous reports that were usually fairly isolated, and we have
Speaker 3: video evidence here. And they're not just going after juveniles
Speaker 3: or something that's caught in a trap or whatever. They're
Speaker 3: going after adult vertebrate prey animals. So a little sidebar,
Speaker 3: who are these California ground squirrels the Odospermophylis BEACHYI. First
Speaker 3: of all, yes, they're cute. According to me, at least
Speaker 3: that's my opinion, Rob, I don't know if you share it,
Speaker 3: but yeah, they're cute little guys.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, I guess, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel like i'm you know, I'm not used to
Speaker 1: being around these California squirrels. But the squirrels i'm around
Speaker 1: here in Georgia, I think of them as I just
Speaker 1: know too much about them and I see them too often.
Speaker 1: I think of them as like, it's hard for me
Speaker 1: to imagine someone thinking they're straight up adorable, because like
Speaker 1: I hear them on the fence, I see the effects
Speaker 1: of their claws on the fence. They're like furry grappling hooks,
Speaker 1: you know, like they're clearly tough creatures. I saw one
Speaker 1: fight off a hawk once in my backyard. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's they're rough and tumble. So yes, cute, but with
Speaker 1: a number of caveats as far as my opinion of
Speaker 1: them goes.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it's going to be all caveats from
Speaker 3: here on out. So yes, they're cute, But Rob, I
Speaker 3: included for you to look at here in our outline.
Speaker 3: I found a picture hosted on the University of California
Speaker 3: Integrated Pest Management Program website. It's a picture of an
Speaker 3: avocado that has been gnawed on by a California ground squirrel.
Speaker 3: And I thought this picture was I don't know, it
Speaker 3: just struck me. It looks both beautiful the pattern that
Speaker 3: emerges and the different colors of the avocado flesh as
Speaker 3: it has been gouged and carved out by the rodent's teeth.
Speaker 3: But also I think it's it's it's hauntingly sad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I have a real visceral reaction to this. It
Speaker 1: is something heartbreaking about it. Potentially wasted avocada. I feel
Speaker 1: this one, like this one is saveable.
Speaker 2: I think I could get in.
Speaker 1: There with a with a with a with a knife,
Speaker 1: cut off the part that's been fouled by the squirrel
Speaker 1: and you know, have plenty leftover for sandwiches and whatnot.
Speaker 3: You better do a good job because you don't know
Speaker 3: what the squirrel has been eating before. The avocado.
Speaker 1: Well, I think it's only going to seep in so far,
Speaker 1: and I'm going to cut that part off and spread
Speaker 1: the rest.
Speaker 3: So these California ground squirrels. The adults typically grow to
Speaker 3: around twenty two thirty centimeters long in the body plus
Speaker 3: another you know, half body length or so again with
Speaker 3: the tail. They have a modeled gray and brown fur
Speaker 3: on their backs and on the flanks, with usually lighter
Speaker 3: colored fur on the underside. They have a bushy tail.
Speaker 3: A couple of the sources I looked at mentioned that
Speaker 3: the tail is not as bushy as the common tree
Speaker 3: squirrels that you see, but it is bushy. Nonetheless, I
Speaker 3: don't know medium bushy.
Speaker 2: Maybe.
Speaker 3: There are natives to the western part of North America,
Speaker 3: found today in US states of California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada,
Speaker 3: and extending south into Baja California. They generally inhabit grasslands
Speaker 3: where they dig out burrows in the earth that are
Speaker 3: sometimes shared by a bunch of different squirrels. They hide
Speaker 3: out and brood their young in the burrows. They typically
Speaker 3: forage during the day. They and they use these burrows
Speaker 3: because in part they are a common prey species to snakes,
Speaker 3: predatory birds, and larger carnivorous mammals. So to be super clear,
Speaker 3: California ground squirrels mostly eat plants. The authors mention that
Speaker 3: They forage most often for seeds that come from grasses
Speaker 3: and oaks, and during the growing season they will eat
Speaker 3: green vegetable matter, including quote, leaves, flowers, buds, stems, shoots, roots, tubers, twigs,
Speaker 3: and bark from a wide variety of different plants. The
Speaker 3: authors mention or one hundred different species of plants that
Speaker 3: they eat from, so as herbivores, they are also very
Speaker 3: flexible foragers, as the avocado art we just talked about
Speaker 3: would indicate they are a common agricultural pest within their range.
Speaker 3: If farmers have to deal with these things a lot,
Speaker 3: especially if you're growing I think, like fruits or nuts.
Speaker 3: But while those foraging strategies are the rule, we also
Speaker 3: get the exceptions, and quite a number of exceptions have
Speaker 3: been observed, maybe to the point where we should question
Speaker 3: whether they become a rule of their own. These observations
Speaker 3: include occasional carnivory, and while the reports are more isolated
Speaker 3: and sporadic, the authors found published accounts of the ground
Speaker 3: squirrels eating invertebrates. Of course, they're going to be eaten,
Speaker 3: you know, insects and other invertebrates, and eggs and nestlings
Speaker 3: of numerous birds including kill deer, California quail, bob white quail,
Speaker 3: ring necked pheasant, mourning dove, dark eyed junco, and American robin.
Speaker 3: Continuing the agricultural pest thing, they have been documented chomping
Speaker 3: ride on into domestic chicken eggs. They have been documented
Speaker 3: to eat fish. I think there's just one occasion of this,
Speaker 3: but eating a small silvery fish called the California grunion.
Speaker 3: And then finally the author's note quote Fitch nineteen forty
Speaker 3: eight observed the California ground squirrel consuming but not directly killing,
Speaker 3: young desert cottontails, adult pocket gophers, and kangaroo rats, so
Speaker 3: eating several of its cousins here. But again to emphasize,
Speaker 3: just because a squirrel is eating a rabbit, that doesn't
Speaker 3: mean it caught and killed a rabbit. It might have
Speaker 3: found a dead one free meal. And there have been,
Speaker 3: as we alluded to earlier, observations of the California ground
Speaker 3: squirrel eating meat in non natural conditions, for example, scavenging
Speaker 3: on human trapped fish and rodents, songbirds, and on other
Speaker 3: California ground squirrels. And there have also sometimes been observed
Speaker 3: instances of these ground squirrels cannibalizing juveniles of their own species.
Speaker 3: But again, what has long been elusive is much evidence,
Speaker 3: extensive evidence of these animals actively hunting and killing adult
Speaker 3: vertebrate prey. Well, this study found, oh yeah, under the
Speaker 3: right conditions, they will absolutely do plenty of that. The
Speaker 3: specific prey here was the California vole or microtus Ce californicus.
Speaker 3: And if you look up this paper, it provides links
Speaker 3: to video that you can watch of these attacks of
Speaker 3: the squirrel just ruthlessly snatching a vole behind the base
Speaker 3: of its skull in its jaws. And I thought in
Speaker 3: this one particular video I saw it was fascinating how
Speaker 3: much it resembled traditional predator behavior, like what you would
Speaker 3: see with a wolf or a dog grabbing a squirrel,
Speaker 3: so like clamp the jaws at the back of the
Speaker 3: neck and shake. But while this did show up in
Speaker 3: the video I was looking at, the authors say that
Speaker 3: this was not the most common type of attack with
Speaker 3: the shaking like this. They characterized the squirrel on vole
Speaker 3: attacks as follows. In three documented hunting attempts from this study,
Speaker 3: squirrels engaged in typical predator stalking behavior, meaning that they
Speaker 3: flattened out their bodies low to the ground, and then
Speaker 3: attempted to minimize the sound produced as they approached prey
Speaker 3: before leaping into a sudden attack. That was the minority
Speaker 3: of cases. Nineteen of the documented hunting attempts involved chasing
Speaker 3: just a squirrel flat out run, chasing a single vole
Speaker 3: across the ground. When the squirrel was able to come
Speaker 3: within range, it would pounce on top of the vole
Speaker 3: and then hold it down with its front paws and jaws.
Speaker 3: Then it would begin biting, most often at the neck,
Speaker 3: but also at other body parts. A bite shaking was
Speaker 3: observed in one attack, and squirrels occasionally but did not
Speaker 3: usually in age in sit and wait ambush strategies, hiding
Speaker 3: behind tall grass. Quote Instead, hunting attempts were best characterized
Speaker 3: by squirrels opportunistically chasing a single vole over a short
Speaker 3: distance in open areas, across dirt substrate. And I thought
Speaker 3: that was interesting that, like, perhaps I'm taking the wrong
Speaker 3: thing away from this, but that just read to me
Speaker 3: as like, huh, you know, they don't maybe they don't
Speaker 3: have a super refined strategy like a lot of obligate
Speaker 3: predators would. They're just sort of winging it.
Speaker 1: But on another level, you could say it's like they
Speaker 1: also kind of know how to do it as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, they do know. I mean they know
Speaker 3: how to bite, to like bite and subdue the prey
Speaker 3: with the four paws and the jaws. Where does that
Speaker 3: knowledge come from? Interesting question?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The authors summarized saying, quote, hunters successfully captured and killed
Speaker 3: a vole in seventeen of the thirty one observed hunting attempts,
Speaker 3: which is fifty five percent. So they observed thirty one
Speaker 3: cases of a squirrel trying to kill a vole. Seventeen
Speaker 3: of the thirty one worked. The other fourteen attempts failed.
Speaker 3: Pray either got away during pursuit, or escaped after being
Speaker 3: initially captured by a squirrel close quote. Another interesting thing
Speaker 3: is that in seventy percent of these kills, the squirrel
Speaker 3: would not eat the vole directly at the kill site,
Speaker 3: but instead carry it away to a second location, sometimes
Speaker 3: even into its burrow or out of view, but other
Speaker 3: times just carrying it away to some different place. And
Speaker 3: I don't know for sure the reason for this, but
Speaker 3: I wonder if this is because the squirrel is prey
Speaker 3: itself and it might not be comfortable being out in
Speaker 3: the open. If this is If this place is the
Speaker 3: place where the vole was vulnerable to the squirrel, that's
Speaker 3: also probably a place where the squirrel is vulnerable to
Speaker 3: one of its predators.
Speaker 1: Right, and now you're presenting two for one deal, So
Speaker 1: you got to get out of there.
Speaker 3: Oh man, if you're like a hawk right here or something,
Speaker 3: and you can get two animals out of a single catch.
Speaker 3: Oh and one more detail from this part about the
Speaker 3: attacks is apparently these ground squirrels, you know what, they
Speaker 3: love to rip off the head quote in eleven. Of
Speaker 3: the events for which consumption of an intact carcass was observed,
Speaker 3: squirrels first removed the head of the vole, so that's
Speaker 3: just procedure. Head remove head first. Next, they either directly
Speaker 3: pulled meat out of the torso or first stripped fur
Speaker 3: from each of these body parts before consuming the exposed meat, organs,
Speaker 3: and cartilage. So an interesting thing about these gory observations
Speaker 3: is that is the context that came in. Because these
Speaker 3: observations were made within the context of a larger project
Speaker 3: known as the Long Term Behavioral Ecology of California Ground
Speaker 3: Squirrels Project. Which had been going on for years. This
Speaker 3: has been carried out at a place called I'm not
Speaker 3: sure I'm pronouncing this correctly, but I think it's Brionas
Speaker 3: Regional Park in California, Briones Regional Park, sort of northeast
Speaker 3: of Oakland and Berkeley. Interestingly, the project was in its
Speaker 3: twelfth year before these instances of squirrels killing and eating
Speaker 3: voles were first observed. And that doesn't mean it never
Speaker 3: happened before, but these squirrels have been studied intensely for
Speaker 3: twelve years in this region before anybody observed them doing this,
Speaker 3: and then once it was observed, they were observed doing
Speaker 3: it all the time, basically every day after the first observation,
Speaker 3: for a period of a couple of months. I was
Speaker 3: reading a press release about this paper that was giving
Speaker 3: some narrative about how the scientists came to these observations,
Speaker 3: and they interview the lead author, Jennifer E. Smith, who
Speaker 3: is an associate professor of biology at University of Wisconsin
Speaker 3: eau Claire, who ends up saying in this press release quote,
Speaker 3: this was shocking. We had never seen this behavior before,
Speaker 3: and emphasize she emphasizes how strange it is that like
Speaker 3: squirrels are. They're just such a familiar animal to people.
Speaker 3: People just see them in their yards in the park
Speaker 3: all the time. And here suddenly, after twelve years of
Speaker 3: intensive observation, we're seeing this this predation behavior happening all
Speaker 3: over the place within the range of this particular study,
Speaker 3: and it's it's like what it's like out of nowhere.
Speaker 3: Apparently there were some undergraduate researchers who had been doing
Speaker 3: field work for this study and they came in one
Speaker 3: day and just you know, ask one of the professors
Speaker 3: on the project about it. They're like, yeah, we saw
Speaker 3: squirrels hunting and killing voles. And the professor was like
Speaker 3: what no, no, no, no, But then saw the footage and
Speaker 3: it's right there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, you can't argue with this footage, some of
Speaker 1: these grizzly photos.
Speaker 3: And as I said, after the first instance, they began
Speaker 3: to see this behavior basically every day, so they observed
Speaker 3: it as a summer behavior throughout June and July twenty
Speaker 3: twenty four, and the researchers did not during this period
Speaker 3: observe the ground squirrels hunting and killing other animals, only voles.
Speaker 3: That's kind of interesting. So it's previously unobserved behavior suddenly
Speaker 3: seems to be happening all over the place at least
Speaker 3: that they're noticing, and it's only targeting one prey species.
Speaker 3: They don't generally become predators. Why would this be Well,
Speaker 3: they ended up pairing this with a with an interesting observation,
Speaker 3: which was a massive increase in a documentation of voles
Speaker 3: logged by local citizen scientists in the area on an
Speaker 3: app called eye Naturalist, which is sort of a biological
Speaker 3: and wildlife social media platform kind of a place being
Speaker 3: log wildlife and the citizen science app. Yeah. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: so they noticed, h that's interesting. So we're seeing suddenly
Speaker 3: ground squirrels showing this thing we've never noticed before where
Speaker 3: they're hunting and killing voles. And also people are saying, whoa,
Speaker 3: there's tons of voles out here. Where did all these
Speaker 3: voles come from? And the authors compare the number of
Speaker 3: vole sidings reported on this app to the ten year
Speaker 3: average from before and found that the peak of vole
Speaker 3: sidings in the summer of twenty twenty four there were
Speaker 3: roughly seven times more vole observations than the previous ten
Speaker 3: year average. So suddenly all these voles coming out of nowhere.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what are you going to do? Right, what
Speaker 1: are you going to do when there's that many voles around?
Speaker 3: Exactly? So, according to the authors, it is normal for
Speaker 3: some vole populations to kind of boom and bust. They
Speaker 3: cycle through these population density patterns and they tend to
Speaker 3: kind of peak every three to five years. But the
Speaker 3: peak achieved in the summer of twenty twenty four, rob
Speaker 3: you can see from a chart I've included, was like,
Speaker 3: what way more than the normal peaks, even the previous
Speaker 3: peaks from like you can see kind of twenty twenty
Speaker 3: or so.
Speaker 1: It's such a peak that it doesn't make you judge
Speaker 1: the squirrel the squirrels at all. You're like, maybe we
Speaker 1: should have been eating vols as well. Clearly it's out
Speaker 1: of control.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: This brings us back to the idea from earlier about
Speaker 3: behavioral flexibility in response to changes in the environment. So,
Speaker 3: like the ecology of fear, there can also be an
Speaker 3: ecology of food abundance. So these two patterns are observed
Speaker 3: and they seem to line up in time. One of
Speaker 3: them is suddenly a big surge in vole populations, and
Speaker 3: the second one is squirrels shift their foraging strategy from
Speaker 3: let's mostly focus on grains and other plant matter to
Speaker 3: if you see a vole, chase it and kill it.
Speaker 3: I mean it's in season exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, to come back to kind of the crude human
Speaker 3: economics analogy I used earlier, you can think of this like,
Speaker 3: you know, I don't normally buy vole meat at the store,
Speaker 3: but you go to the store and vole meat is
Speaker 3: so so cheap they're practically giving it away, So why not.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: One of the authors of the paper, Sonia Wilde of
Speaker 3: UC Davis, gave a quote to that press release I mentioned, saying, quote,
Speaker 3: the fact that California ground squirrels are behaviorally flexible and
Speaker 3: can respond to changes in food availability might help them
Speaker 3: persist in environments rapidly changing due to the presence of humans.
Speaker 3: Oh And I thought that was kind of interesting because
Speaker 3: on one hand, you could just say, well, you know,
Speaker 3: these squirrels, this squirrel species has a certain amount of
Speaker 3: behavioral flexibility. That's part of its natural repertoire. You know,
Speaker 3: it can adapt and that's just part of what kind
Speaker 3: of animal it is, And that's totally possible. But I
Speaker 3: also wonder if humans could have, inadvertently by our presence,
Speaker 3: helped create populations of more behaviorally flexible squirrels. You know,
Speaker 3: if we're going around wherever we go, changing the nature
Speaker 3: of the environment, changing the you know, the very topography
Speaker 3: of the landscape, or changing what kind of food is available,
Speaker 3: we're changing all sorts of things wherever we go. Does
Speaker 3: that sort of in our wake cause these secondary effects
Speaker 3: where we select for more behaviorally flexible populations of animals
Speaker 3: in the areas with proximity to human civilization.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah, we even changes that we might
Speaker 1: not think of being that drastic. They have these ripple
Speaker 1: effects in the environment, and yeah, next thing you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's squirrels ripping heads off.
Speaker 3: Now, plenty of unanswered questions remain, like how common is this?
Speaker 3: Really unclear fascinating question we don't fully have the answers to,
Speaker 3: But how do the squirrels actually make this shift? Like
Speaker 3: where does the hunting behavior come from? Is it a
Speaker 3: learned behavior that's passed down from from parent offspring or
Speaker 3: is it a kind of instinctual and great behavior, In
Speaker 3: which case, what sort of instincts are harnessed from the
Speaker 3: normal foraging strategies and repurposed for hunting if it is instinctual.
Speaker 3: Another how like how does it get triggered? You know,
Speaker 3: how does the squirrel know to shift? It's say like, okay,
Speaker 3: it is time to hunt now. And another interesting thing
Speaker 3: like what are the secondary dynamics that emerge We were
Speaker 3: talking earlier about secondary dynamics that you might not always
Speaker 3: envision that come out of animals changing their behavior. Does
Speaker 3: this change what the voles do? And does that have
Speaker 3: secondary effects?
Speaker 1: You know, this I can't help but think about that, Like,
Speaker 1: it's hard to really set aside this idea. The squirrels
Speaker 1: are breaking bad here by eating meat, and it like
Speaker 1: they have this really dramatic moment where they say, now
Speaker 1: I embrace death or something. You know, But I maybe
Speaker 1: the better way to think of it is to remind ourselves,
Speaker 1: perhaps that the squirrel doesn't see a difference between ultimately
Speaker 1: between the food that is a from seed or a
Speaker 1: shoot from a plant and from the body of a vowel.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It's like these are all like distinctions of vegetation and
Speaker 1: animal Like, yes, they're at present in the strategy that
Speaker 1: is employed, the methodology of obtaining that food, but in
Speaker 1: terms of like seeing this big divide between plant world
Speaker 1: and animal world, between plant food and animal food is
Speaker 1: maybe more of a human construct, and we bring that
Speaker 1: baggage into examining these creatures.
Speaker 3: What are these big furry nuts that run away from me?
Speaker 3: They're sure are delicious?
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right?
Speaker 1: So I was looking around as well for some articles
Speaker 1: from the past several years on squirrels in general, but
Speaker 1: also squirrels eating meat. And yeah, another one that came
Speaker 1: to light since we last recordar did the blood dripping
Speaker 1: mos of squirrels. This is one that was published in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two. It was published in the journal Acta
Speaker 1: Ethylogica and it's titled first Evidence for active carnivorous predation
Speaker 1: in the European ground squirrel by Kachimakova. At all, So,
Speaker 1: the European ground squirrel is Spermophilus setellus. Now, did we
Speaker 1: already mention the genus Spermophilus close?
Speaker 3: The California ground squirrels are in the genus oto Spermophilus.
Speaker 1: Okay, so some similarities here in the naming. Anyway, some
Speaker 1: of you might be wondering, what why are they thought
Speaker 1: of as spermophiles? Well, the translation to fixate on here
Speaker 1: is seed love. So they are seed lovers as in
Speaker 1: European ground squirrels sure do love to eat plant seeds.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the endangered squirrel species in question here is native
Speaker 1: to Eastern and Central Europe, and indeed a huge part
Speaker 1: of its diet consists of seeds, plant shoots, roots, and
Speaker 1: flightless invertebrates or in the mix as well. But this
Speaker 1: paper presented evidence for active predation by the European ground squirrel,
Speaker 1: in particular the hunting, killing, and eating of active animals,
Speaker 1: so not merely the weakend, the dead and the so forth,
Speaker 1: as we've been discussing, but actually going after I don't know,
Speaker 1: more formidable prey. You might say, I don't know with
Speaker 1: all the caveats of predation that we mentioned earlier. Now,
Speaker 1: to be sure, European ground squirrels are still mostly eating seeds,
Speaker 1: but in the spring they supplement their diet with bugs
Speaker 1: consisting of quote considerable amount of animal components, and researchers
Speaker 1: have also known for a while that they'll eat voles,
Speaker 1: they'll eat green lizards. These have been found in their
Speaker 1: stomach contents, which is a lot of the previous findings
Speaker 1: that we've had to go on. Ground nesting birds are
Speaker 1: also seemed to be on the menu, and like many
Speaker 1: other animals, European ground squirrels are also opportunistic cannibals. If
Speaker 1: there is an opportunity to munch on a dead number
Speaker 1: of your own species, or perhaps there's there also scenarios
Speaker 1: where one might feast upon the young, that sort of
Speaker 1: thing is totally on the table, you know, it comes
Speaker 1: down to basic economy of energy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and as we said, California ground squirrel does the
Speaker 3: same thing occasionally, if the opportunity presents itself, they'll eat
Speaker 3: their own kind, right.
Speaker 1: So as this has been the case with these other studies,
Speaker 1: a lot of the past evidence was based on stomach
Speaker 1: contents and observations of squirrels feeding on carcasses. But questions remain,
Speaker 1: did they actively pursue live prey hunting and killing them
Speaker 1: or would they mirror you know, basically scavengers and at
Speaker 1: times very opportunistic carnivores. Well, the authors point out that
Speaker 1: there was no previous evidence of the European ground squirrels
Speaker 1: killing prey, hunting and killing prey until now, and that
Speaker 1: was the that's the big finding of this paper, and
Speaker 1: getting into the observation portion of the study. They share
Speaker 1: the following on two six, twenty twenty at nineteen twenty seven,
Speaker 1: that's the time in the area of the town of Schumann,
Speaker 1: and they include of very detailed information about exactly where
Speaker 1: this occurs. A young learning to fly Eurasian tree sparrow
Speaker 1: passer montanas was caught by an adult European ground squirrel.
Speaker 1: The ground squirrel ripped out the sparrow's abdominal cavity and
Speaker 1: started to feed on the bird's internal organs while still
Speaker 1: alive and waving its wings.
Speaker 3: Oh, and they got a photo.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is the photographic evidence of what they refer
Speaker 1: to as the predation event. And yeah, you can see
Speaker 1: this little guy again very arguably cute creature. And you
Speaker 1: can also see that it is munching on the body
Speaker 1: of a bird and there is blood flowing from the
Speaker 1: mouth or look, I'm getting the sense of blood flowing
Speaker 1: from the mouth of the squirrel.
Speaker 3: I have to share you included in the outline here
Speaker 3: at the painting by Goya of Saturn devouring his son,
Speaker 3: and the resemblance is striking. Yes, this is absolutely a
Speaker 3: prelude to the witch's Sabbath.
Speaker 1: Now as to why this particular European ground squirrel turned
Speaker 1: to the meat of the living. They suspect that it
Speaker 1: is a quote seasonal increase in the energetic needs of
Speaker 1: the European ground squirrel. So again, this photo was taken
Speaker 1: on June second. Interesting that our previous example was also
Speaker 1: more or less in the same window with the voles June, yeah, July.
Speaker 1: So the June second and the author's site that this
Speaker 1: is a crucial and delicate time for the European ground squirrel.
Speaker 1: So what's been happening in the European ground squirrel world
Speaker 1: at this point is the males have just finished fiercely
Speaker 1: competing with each other for mates, and so many of
Speaker 1: them are weakened or even injured from those ensuing battles
Speaker 1: and just also just the energy expenditure of the whole endeavor. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: the females have already given birth and they are nursing
Speaker 1: their young all right, which of course also requires a
Speaker 1: lot of energy. On top of all of this, highly
Speaker 1: nutritious seeds are not yet numerous in the environment, and
Speaker 1: what is available is ravaged by overgrazing. Meanwhile, in the
Speaker 1: bird world, juvenile birds have left their nests, so they're vulnerable,
Speaker 1: they're not ready for this cruel world, and so these
Speaker 1: seed loving rodents turn their ravenous attention to these available
Speaker 1: riches of the flesh. So the way they're analyzing it
Speaker 1: and writing about it in the paper, we have part
Speaker 1: of it is the fact that there is suddenly this,
Speaker 1: in this case, a feathered fruit or nut that is available,
Speaker 1: that is presenting itself, is on the menu. But also
Speaker 1: on top of that, some of the seeds they really
Speaker 1: depend upon are not yet available, and they're worn out
Speaker 1: and have increased nutritional needs, and so it just leads
Speaker 1: right to the blood feast.
Speaker 3: So the situation is, we just finished some strenuous activity,
Speaker 3: were ravenously hungry, all the restaurants are closed. What are
Speaker 3: we going to do. Here's something, here's something with feathers
Speaker 3: on it. It keeps flapping its wings. I'm just trying to
Speaker 3: eat the seeds. Yeah, yeah, the sick seeds out of
Speaker 3: its belly. So another example here. And then you know
Speaker 3: there's the added importance that they discussed in the paper too,
Speaker 3: that this is an endangered species, and so you know
Speaker 3: there's even added there's added incentive to understand it and
Speaker 3: help us figure out how to protect it now. In
Speaker 3: looking I was looking through various squirrel related news items
Speaker 3: from the past several years. Inevitably, there have been a
Speaker 3: number of news stories dealing with squirrels, generally in urban environments,
Speaker 3: behaving aggressively or even attacking human beings. I may be
Speaker 3: remembering this wrong, but I sort of think like they
Speaker 3: were the kind of reports that were, like, you couldn't
Speaker 3: totally discount them, but you also weren't sure you should
Speaker 3: believe them either.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of these are, you know, anecdotal, and
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's one of those things where when
Speaker 1: squirrels are going about their normal business, nobody is writing
Speaker 1: about it in the local newspaper, but there's one attack
Speaker 1: and it gets written up. So I don't want to
Speaker 1: present the idea that these attacks are common, but they
Speaker 1: apparently did occur. So just a brief example of some
Speaker 1: of the headlines I ran across, here's one from The
Speaker 1: Guardian from January twenty twenty one. It was angry vicious
Speaker 1: spate of squirrel attacks leaves New York City neighborhood in fear.
Speaker 1: At least three people in Rego Park and Queens have
Speaker 1: been jumped upon and bitten by a possibly deranged squirrel.
Speaker 3: Okay, I apologize for laughing. Squirrel attacks are in one
Speaker 3: sense inherently funny, but now I'm thinking about it like
Speaker 3: if a squirrel did jump on you and start biting you,
Speaker 3: that would be scary.
Speaker 2: It would be terrifying.
Speaker 3: Okay, sorry, sorry, sorry for laughing.
Speaker 1: But still it just drives home the fact that we
Speaker 1: often just totally disregard them or think they're cute and amusing,
Speaker 1: and then when we encounter the savage side of the squirrel,
Speaker 1: it is shocking and terrified. Here's another one. This was
Speaker 1: from BBC News, December twenty twenty one. Squirrel injures eighteen
Speaker 1: people in two days of attacks in Buckley. A gray
Speaker 1: squirrel which attacked and injured eighteen people has been captured
Speaker 1: and put down.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna flag that one for later and go see
Speaker 3: how the eighteen people were chained together here.
Speaker 1: Yeah, apologies, but I'm not going to respond to individual articles.
Speaker 1: You were going to do more generally.
Speaker 3: I'm not taking questions on these squirrel attacks.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And here's another one. This was from NBC fifteen News,
Speaker 1: September eighteenth, twenty twenty four. Squirrels on a train. Train
Speaker 1: ride canceled due to attacking squirrels, Gomshall Surrey. So these
Speaker 1: are just a taste of some of the headlines it
Speaker 1: ran across. Many more squirrel attacks stories regarding isolated incidents
Speaker 1: which seemed to regularly get picked up by the media
Speaker 1: and sort of passed up the media chain. Now, these
Speaker 1: incidents don't necessarily represent anything new. I don't want to
Speaker 1: suggest that. That Guardian article, for example, by Oliver Millman
Speaker 1: points out that the two most likely causes for this
Speaker 1: sort of behavior are unsurprisingly disease on one hand, and
Speaker 1: on the other hand, becoming overly accustomed to feeding by humans.
Speaker 1: Ah yes, yeah, So on the disease front, of course, rabies,
Speaker 1: which we've talked about on the show before. It's apparently
Speaker 1: rare in squirrels, but it does happen according to d
Speaker 1: C Health, and that source, which is undated on the
Speaker 1: DC Health website, claims that no person in the US
Speaker 1: has ever contracted rabies from a squirrel. But it is
Speaker 1: obviously possible for someone to contract rabies from a squirrel,
Speaker 1: as they can carry rabies. Rabies concern, they point out,
Speaker 1: is warranted, especially if the squirrel is behaving abnormally when
Speaker 1: it bites you. And I did look up some of
Speaker 1: this on the CDC website. Centers for Disease Control Prevention
Speaker 1: says it's extremely rare for squirrels to have rabies or
Speaker 1: to pass rabies to pets or humans in the United States. Now,
Speaker 1: on the other end of the spectrum, the idea that
Speaker 1: people are feeding squirrels that are getting close to squirrels,
Speaker 1: and in doing so they are eroding the healthy fear
Speaker 1: of humans that squirrels have. That is obviously a major issue. Squirrels,
Speaker 1: no matter how cute they are in your eyes, they
Speaker 1: should remain afraid of human beings and practices like feeding
Speaker 1: them by hand is certainly just asking for a bite.
Speaker 1: And also if they feel threatened at all, they will
Speaker 1: also attack you, which it comes into the scenario as
Speaker 1: well if you have already either you or other people
Speaker 1: have done something to erode that distance between you and
Speaker 1: the wild squirrel.
Speaker 3: This is the sinister inverse of the ecology of fear.
Speaker 3: This is the ecology of brazen This.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I probably shared this story in the last Squirrel episode.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell it again anyway. I only have so
Speaker 1: many stories, folks, but years ago, my wife and I
Speaker 1: encountered a very aggressive rock squirrel in Grand Canyon National Park.
Speaker 1: Luckily no one was bitten or injured, but we were
Speaker 1: out on a rocky hike along this like outcropping, and
Speaker 1: we'd paused for a moment. My wife had pulled out
Speaker 1: a snack bar, and that's when a rock squirrel appeared
Speaker 1: and began to move in very close, ultimately jumping on
Speaker 1: her leg. Luckily, I believe she was wearing jeans at
Speaker 1: the time, and then we drove the squirrel away with
Speaker 1: a hat. Luckily, again no one was hurt, but it
Speaker 1: was always struck stuck with us as a great example
Speaker 1: of why you don't feed wild animals, because again, you
Speaker 1: erode that healthy gap between you and the wild, and
Speaker 1: then that animal thinks you are a source of food
Speaker 1: and it can come in closer. And you know, obviously
Speaker 1: it gets even worse when you're dealing with larger animals,
Speaker 1: more destructive animals, and potentially deadly animals. And you know,
Speaker 1: mainly thinking of bears here, but even with something like
Speaker 1: the squirrel, you're you are doing that squirrel a great
Speaker 1: disservice and potentially doing a great disservice to anyone that's
Speaker 1: going to be in contact with that animal.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is why they emphasize like the bearproof garbage
Speaker 3: cans in relevant areas and things like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, and that's that's another big
Speaker 1: thing too, Like you go through areas like Yosemite, and
Speaker 1: you know, you frequently pass signs they show, well, a
Speaker 1: bear died here because it was hit by a car, which,
Speaker 1: on one hand, you know, cut down on speeding obviously.
Speaker 1: But one thing that the Grand Canyon National Park points
Speaker 1: out about squirrels in particular, but also the supplies to
Speaker 1: other animals, is if you're feeding them from vehicles, this
Speaker 1: too causes animals to congregate near roads and vehicles. So
Speaker 1: Grand Canyon National Park sometimes goes as far as to
Speaker 1: say the rock squirrel is the most dangerous animal in
Speaker 1: the park. If you're not familiar with the environment of
Speaker 1: the Grand Nation Grand Canyon National Park, you should know that.
Speaker 1: Of course, they're much larger creatures, and some of those too,
Speaker 1: you can make a strong argument that they're they're natural
Speaker 1: to humans has been somewhat eroded, but squirrel incidents with
Speaker 1: rock squirrels do occur due to humans feeding them, they
Speaker 1: end up congregating near the places humans gather, including outside
Speaker 1: gift shops and snack bars, and as Joshua Bowling reported
Speaker 1: in an asy Central article from twenty eighteen, they've also
Speaker 1: been reported to bite people just for pointing at them. So, again,
Speaker 1: this is not something that's going to get you bitten
Speaker 1: by a squirrel in the wild. That is like naturally
Speaker 1: removed from your vicinity. But once you've eroded that healthy distance,
Speaker 1: things like this apparently become possible. It feels threatened, it bites,
Speaker 1: and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so when parks and other places say don't feed
Speaker 3: the animals, they mean it. They're not messing around. There's
Speaker 3: a good reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, there's the old saying a fed animal
Speaker 1: is a dead animal for many reasons. Roads, cars, contact
Speaker 1: with humans, threats to humans, and so forth. Grand Cash
Speaker 1: and the Canyon National Park advisors. You keep a distance
Speaker 1: from wildlife, including their squirrels, don't approach the wildlife, including
Speaker 1: the squirrels, and if the wildlife approaches you, you report it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Tattle on those squirrels.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, squirrels are wild animals. I just want to
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna There are other recent news items one
Speaker 1: could get into and I'm not going to, but squirrels
Speaker 1: are wild animals and they should remain wild, and we
Speaker 1: should do whatever we can to keep them that way.
Speaker 1: It's our responsibility to the environment that we have shifted
Speaker 1: and changed, and not just because they might bite us,
Speaker 1: but let that be the added a stick to the carrot.
Speaker 3: Well, what do you think, Rob, Does that do it
Speaker 3: for today?
Speaker 1: I think so. We'll see what another five years this
Speaker 1: full update the State of the Squirrel Kingdom.
Speaker 2: To another squirrel sequel, Yeah, or sooner.
Speaker 1: If they eat more interesting things, you never know, never
Speaker 1: know what's going to come up.
Speaker 3: How do they level up from this? I guess they
Speaker 3: got to start eating things bigger than them and then
Speaker 3: with that'd really get our attention once more.
Speaker 1: Absolutely all right, we're going to go and close it out,
Speaker 1: but we'd love to hear from everyone out there. Do
Speaker 1: you have thoughts on squirrels, your encounters, your observations, how
Speaker 1: this information that we've discussed here or this podcast itself
Speaker 1: has changed your view of squirrels, or maybe you're like
Speaker 1: just nodding your head and saying, yeah, this is squirrels
Speaker 1: to a t.
Speaker 2: This is what they do. This is who they are.
Speaker 1: Whatever your thoughts off, yes, yeah, either way, rite in
Speaker 1: let us know we'd love to hear from you. Just
Speaker 1: a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
Speaker 1: a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays
Speaker 1: and Thursdays, short form episodes on Wednesdays. Let's see, we
Speaker 1: have a weird house cinema on Fridays. That's our time
Speaker 1: to set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
Speaker 1: weird films, and then the rest of the days we
Speaker 1: fill in with some classic content of Vault episodes and
Speaker 1: so forth.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks, as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
Speaker 3: If you would like to get in touch with us
Speaker 3: with feedback on this episode or any other, suggest a
Speaker 3: topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
Speaker 3: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Speaker 3: Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production
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