[HN Gopher] Squirrels hunting and eating meat
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Squirrels hunting and eating meat
Author : ulrischa
Score : 52 points
Date : 2024-12-18 19:11 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gizmodo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com)
| zmj wrote:
| Everything is an opportunistic carnivore. I once came across a
| turtle chowing down on a dead frog.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Apparently cows are happy to eat nestlings if they happen to
| find a bird's nest while they're grazing.
|
| If you're an animal, there's no food better than meat.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Everything will eat anything if its hungry enough but to say
| there is no better food is a broad statement I'm not
| comfortable agreeing with.
| nradov wrote:
| "Better" is kind of a vague term. A more precise and
| limited statement is that meat has the highest protein
| quality index. There could be some other disadvantages,
| depending on your species.
| scns wrote:
| Horses snacking chicks. Videos easy to be found.
| manquer wrote:
| That would only be true if you have the stomach biome to
| digest and extract the nutrients.
|
| What is the point of eating something that is hard to process
| and digest and has no nutritional value for you
|
| For herbivores, meat is objectively bad food .
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| You're wrong. Cows will eat meat, horses will eat meat,
| pigs will eat meat, chickens will eat meat, deer will eat
| meat. If they can get it in their mouth, they will eat it.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Mad cow disease didn't just happen. Though the idea that
| cows would preferentially eat brain and spinal cord
| tissue doesn't seem likely.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Ironically mad cow _is_ one of the rare transmissible
| diseases that "can just happen" with no external
| causative agent!
|
| It's just a misfolding of a protein that starts a chain
| reaction of similarly misfolded proteins.
| manquer wrote:
| Anything can any thing , that is not what I said .
|
| OP implied they like it if they can get it, and is the
| better food for them , that is not true
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| It is true. If you prefer grass to birds, you can just go
| around the birds as you find them. The grass isn't going
| anywhere.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The point of eating meat is that it's easy to digest. This
| isn't a case where two things are difficult in different
| ways and you want to do the thing you're specialized in.
| Meat is easy to digest, and plants are hard to digest, no
| matter what.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I don't know but I once watched a deer eat a bird so they
| clearly have some incentive
| HankB99 wrote:
| I recall a study that identified deer as a major predator
| of bird nests. I don't recall if it was eggs or young
| that they went after.
|
| I can't find a reference to the study at the moment.
| tarboreus wrote:
| It's plants you need a fancy setup for. Also, the
| microbiome thing, surprisingly, isn't universal, a lot of
| animals have no stomach microbiome to speak of.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/04/animals
| -...
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _For herbivores, meat is objectively bad food ._
|
| We feed cattle the leftovers from processing meat. It's how
| we got mad cow disease.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Most herbivores I'm aware of will at least occasionally eat
| meat or insects. Even grazers.
|
| I would be kind of surprised if there's any "true and pure"
| herbivorous vertebrate.
|
| Meat is rich in nutrients that even herbivores need and is
| difficult to get entirely from plants.
|
| Vegans are the anomaly.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I would guess that a digestive system that can extract
| adequate nutrition from grass will extract something of
| value from meat. On the other hand, if the meat content
| became a significant part of the diet, I can imagine it
| could become harmful, for example by messing with the
| digestive process or by delivering toxic levels of certain
| products.
| lacy_tinpot wrote:
| You should try raising cows on a carnivore diet.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The cows would be happy, but that would be significantly
| more expensive than feeding them plants.
|
| Note that mad cow disease came from feeding cows to cows.
| Giving them meat isn't exactly an innovation.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > Giving them meat isn't exactly an innovation.
|
| True, but the results were.
| m463 wrote:
| Look, that rabbit's got a vicious streak a mile wide!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_of_Caerbannog
| aeonik wrote:
| Even trees will take nutrients from animals with a little help
| from fungal networks:
|
| https://web.uvic.ca/~reimlab/salmonforest.html
|
| https://depts.washington.edu/hortlib/pal/salmon-dna-in-trees...
| (note, Salmon DNA isn't in the trees, just nutrients, in case
| you don't read this article).
| RajT88 wrote:
| Turtles are carnivores, no? They are bitey as hell. All of
| them. You catch them on cut bait, worms, minnows when fishing.
| Even the ones without very sharp mouths, like softshell
| turtles.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| > along with Sonja Wild of UC Davis, who also contributed to the
| study
|
| I love me some nominative determinism.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > I love me some nom...
|
| ... said the squirrel
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Worth it
| c22 wrote:
| Probably about 20 years ago, near Boston, I remember noticing a
| reddish-brown squirrel sitting in a tree gnawing on a fried
| chicken leg and found the sight mildly absurd.
| noduerme wrote:
| That must've been Colonel Scampers.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Pizza rat is going to pizza. The most successful animals are
| generally those that will take calories from anywhere they can,
| with things like pandas and koalas at the other end of the
| spectrum.
| zeofig wrote:
| I knew it.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I was typing the same thing when I saw this comment.
|
| I am not at all shocked squirrels are vicious killers.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I understand chipmunks will bite the tops off the skulls of baby
| birds so they can eat the brains.
| Loughla wrote:
| At my parents house, the squirrels often kill and eat bluejays.
| I'm the winter they hide the wings in snow drifts. When the
| spring thaw comes there will be dozens of disembodied bird wings
| scattered around the yard.
|
| I thought it was common knowledge that squirrels are
| opportunistic. They're rodents. They eat whatever they can get.
| echelon wrote:
| I've always known squirrels to eat birds. The fact that
| scientists are new to this fact is what is surprising.
|
| It might just be that the headline is bad and the literature is
| simply describing vole predation.
|
| Anecdata:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/zoology/comments/2bypwd/i_saw_a_gra...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/birding/comments/1d1ddnv/birdhouses...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/14715zj/squirrel_eatin...
| (graphic video)
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/dsws02/a_squirrel_eati...
| (different graphic video)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9F-lnJtkDA (graphic video
| eating a mouse)
|
| etc.
|
| The really graphic stuff you tend to see when you look for it
| is the raptors eating the squirrels. Bird eats squirrel eats
| bird. The circle of life.
| salynchnew wrote:
| > It might just be that the headline is bad and the
| literature is simply describing vole predation.
|
| Correct!
|
| From the article:
|
| > Any supplementation of their vegetarian diet was
| historically believed to primarily occur through eating
| insects or, on occasion, nest predation of eggs or young
| hatchlings (Bradley and Marzluff 2003).
|
| > Roughly 30 years ago, Callahan (1993) radically altered our
| perception of squirrels by characterizing as many as 30
| species of the family Sciuridae as facultative predators of
| small vertebrates capable of killing and consuming adult
| fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals (Table S1).
|
| The study is itself a detailed breakdown of changes in
| foraging behavior linkedin to "food pulses" (which I guess
| means the times when various food sources are available, a la
| acorns in the fall and sprouts in the spring).
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| Maybe the scientists should have done a quick google before
| declaring nobody has seen this behavior before.
| xattt wrote:
| In the context of H5N1, this gives some new insight of the
| likelihood of the virus jumping species. Birds are
| everywhere, squirrels in urban environments moreso.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Wow, that's... really gross. The wings, not the hunting.
|
| I knew squirrels would eat meat opportunistically but I wasn't
| aware that whole populations hunted particular animals
| systematically.
| tzs wrote:
| There are many different species of squirrel, and different
| species have different diets.
|
| Knowing nothing about where your parent's house is but guessing
| it is somewhere in the US if I had to bet I'd bet that the
| squirrels there are Eastern gray squirrels. They are native to
| the Eastern US but have taken up residence in much of the rest
| of the country. One of the reasons they do well outside of
| their native habitat is that they are not at all picky eaters.
| So yes it was common knowledge that they will sometimes kill
| other animals and eat them.
|
| The article is about California ground squirrels. Until
| recently they were not known to eat meat.
|
| BTW, how the Eastern gray squirrels spread so much is
| interesting. As cities grew people in them wanted to have some
| connection to nature, and as part of that a lot of places
| wanted to have some wild animals in their city parks. Tree
| squirrels were a common choice.
|
| So how do you get squirrels to take up residence in your park?
| Your first thought is probably that you send some people out to
| the nearest wild forest, trap enough squirrels to form a viable
| breeding population, and release them in the parks.
|
| The problem with that is that in many cities the parks don't
| have native trees. People want parks to have trees that aren't
| too tall, with reasonably wide canopies, and that don't grow
| too close together.
|
| That's great if you are someplace where the native trees are
| like that. If you are someplace like say Seattle where the
| native trees are tall narrow Fir trees that close together what
| they did was import trees from the Eastern US.
|
| The native squirrels wouldn't necessarily eat the nuts from
| those non-native trees. That was the case in Seattle. Western
| gray squirrels really only want to eat the nuts from native
| trees.
|
| And so to get squirrels that would be happy in a park full of
| trees imported from the Eastern US cities then imported
| squirrels from the Eastern US. And since Eastern gray squirrels
| are not picky eaters they are also happy with native nuts, and
| quickly spread beyond the parks.
| Loughla wrote:
| They're mostly red squirrels.
| gazook89 wrote:
| In Minneapolis, MN, there is a historical plaque that notes
| the day and location of the first gray squirrels introduced
| to the city as a gift from Seattle/Washington. It's in Loring
| Park.
|
| So kind of opposite direction.
| tzs wrote:
| That's interesting, so I searched for more information.
|
| Does the plaque actually say Seattle or just Washington?
| What I found [1] suggests the squirrels were introduced
| around 1909 and came from Washington DC, bought from this
| guy [2].
|
| Here's a summary, but read the article I linked. I'm
| leaving out lots of interesting details.
|
| Unlike Seattle, the problem in Minneapolis wasn't that the
| native squirrels didn't like the trees. The park had plenty
| of native red squirrels.
|
| The problem was that Theodore Wirth, the park supervisor,
| hated red squirrels. He thought they killed too many
| songbirds, and he loved songbirds. Red squirrels did
| occasionally eat songbird eggs but the actual main threat
| to songbirds in the park was humans.
|
| Red squirrels are also very territorial and aggressively
| defend that territory. They are happy to live off the food
| the trees provide so don't really warm up to humans.
| Instead they yell at humans to try to drive them away.
|
| Grays love to eat all kind of things, and so quickly come
| to see humans as friendly bringers of all kinds of food.
|
| To address this perceived red squirrel problem Thomas
| ordered park police to execute all the red squirrels and
| brought in the Eastern gray squirrels.
|
| The grays adapted so well that by the 1930s some people
| were complaining:
|
| > They adapted to city life so eagerly that by 1930, the
| Tribune was lamenting that Loring Park's squirrels had
| become spoiled "cream-puff squirrels" that bore little
| resemblance to their ancestral "true" gray squirrel of the
| American wilderness.
|
| > "Any day in Loring Park a squirrel may choose between ice
| cream cones, cake and a dozen kinds of sweetmeats, or enjoy
| all of them to his capacity," the Tribune reported.
| "Instinctively they still store acorns from the old oaks.
| But it is a lackadaisical effort."
|
| [1] https://www2.startribune.com/gray-red-squirrels-
| theodore-wir...
|
| [2] https://www.ebay.com/itm/395169313155
| estebarb wrote:
| At the university squirrels regularly stole our pizzas ( see
| https://imgur.com/gallery/HBLFoNA ). At my house, they also took
| avocados.
| loudandskittish wrote:
| ...something happened. Growing up, I had cats that ate squirrels.
| Then, sometime around the early 2000s, I had cats that were being
| chased by squirrels.
| noduerme wrote:
| My ex's cat spent a lot of time outdoors and in the barn, and
| picked up the "chit-chit-chit" noise that angry squirrels make.
| The cat does it every time she's annoyed.
| xeonmc wrote:
| For a realistic fictional portrayal of this observation, see
| Tooth And Tail[0]
|
| [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/286000/Tooth_and_Tail/
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