Why These Squirrels Are Eating Meat
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Hey, Shortwavers. Jessica Young here. And Regina Barber. With our biweekly science news roundup featuring the hosts of All Things Considered. And today we have Juana Summers.
Hello. Thanks for having me. I hear today we're talking about carnivorous squirrels hunting in California. Yeah.
Yes. And also a new study charting the biodiversity on ancient Earth. And new insights into how humans and dogs became friends. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Thanks so much.
Okay, Juana, where do you want to start? Okay, we got to start off with these squirrels. I thought squirrels ate nuts. Yeah, so a study that was just published in the Journal of Ethology shows a group of California ground squirrels hunting, killing, and eating a vole, like a little mouse. And I talked with the lead researcher and a behavioral ecologist, Jennifer Smith. She's at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.
We have one squirrel approaching a vole, targeting that vole, biting it at the neck and taking it down, eventually crunching through the skull and then eating the meat from the bones.
Wow, I am suddenly not hungry anymore. Okay, this really sounds like serious predator behavior. Is this a new phenomenon?
Well, Jennifer says if you look through the literature, there are other accounts of this.
There's been accumulating evidence of one or two events within a species of a red squirrel taking a sparrow. They tend to try to take chickens?
There's also accounts of squirrels eating like roadkill or insects. But what's new here is that they've documented the whole process from start to finish with video, the hunt, the kill, and then the consumption. And they've shown that this isn't just like a one-off, but part of these squirrels' behavior.
And where exactly do these fiercely predatory squirrels live?
So this study is only looking at two populations of squirrels in a regional park in the Bay Area in California. They actually saw this during the 12th year of a long-term study.
No. So Jennifer says that squirrels are actually like raccoons, bears, coyotes. They're just really flexible animals. And this vole population had a huge increase this year, you know, five to six times higher than normal. So the squirrels just took advantage of that.
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