Skip Navigation


Behavioral Ecology Advance Access originally published online on January 19, 2007
Behavioral Ecology 2007 18(2):456-459; doi:10.1093/beheco/arl107
This Article
Right arrow Full Text Freely available
Right arrow FREE Full Text (PDF) Freely available
Right arrow All Versions of this Article:
18/2/456    most recent
arl107v1
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in ISI Web of Science
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrow Search for citing articles in:
ISI Web of Science (2)
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Male, L. H.
Right arrow Articles by Smulders, T. V.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow Articles by Male, L. H.
Right arrow Articles by Smulders, T. V.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Memory for food caches: not just for retrieval

Lucinda H. Male and Tom V. Smulders

Newcastle University, School of Biology and Psychology, Henry Wellcome Building for Neuroecology, Framlington Place, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 4HH, UK

Address correspondence to T.V. Smulders. E-mail: tom.smulders{at}ncl.ac.uk.


  Abstract

Many animals use hoarding as a long-term strategy to ensure a food supply at times of shortage. Hoarders employ strategies that enhance their ability to relocate caches such as remembering where caches are located. Long-term scatterhoarders, whose caches have potentially high pilferage rates, should also hoard in a way to reduce potential cache pilferers' ability to find caches. Previous studies have demonstrated that this could be achieved by hyperdispersing caches to reduce the foraging efficiency of pilferers. This study investigates whether coal tits (Parus ater) indeed place their caches away from existing ones. In our experiment, birds hoarded food in 3 conditions: when caches from a previous storage session were still present, when caches from a previous storage session were not present anymore because the bird had retrieved them, and when caches from a previous storage session had been removed by the experimenter. We show that coal tits hoard away from existing caches and that they do not use cues from extant caches to do this. This evidence is consistent with the use of memory for the locations of previous caches when deciding where to place new caches. This finding has important implications for our understanding of the selective pressures that have shaped spatial memory in food-hoarding birds.

Key words: cache dispersal, coal tits, cognitive ecology, food-hoarding birds, Parus ater.

Received 4 July 2006; revised 30 November 2006; accepted 17 December 2006.


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Behav EcolHome page
L. J. Hopewell, L. A. Leaver, and S. E.G. Lea
Effects of competition and food availability on travel time in scatter-hoarding gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis)
Behav. Ecol., July 30, 2008; (2008) arn095v1.
[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


Disclaimer:
Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.