Raccoons might want to break into your trash can even without delicious leftovers inside
A raccoon interacts with a lock hanging off one side of the multiaccess puzzle box used in the research, one of the most challenging access strategies tested. We leverage third party services to both verify and deliver email.
A raccoon interacts with a lock hanging off one side of the multiaccess puzzle box used in the research, one of the most challenging access strategies tested.. We leverage third party services to both verify and deliver email. By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes.These meddlesome “trash pandas” have dexterous paws and considerable brain power that have helped them thrive in a human-dominated world—even—constantly thwarting attempts to keep them from ransacking waste bins for tasty morsels. “Raccoons have very dense brains, and that likely explains their heightened ability to solve problems and to be behaviorally flexible,” says Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley.On supporting science journalism. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. The study relied on what researchers call a multiaccess puzzle box, a clear plastic box that has multiple doors and windows—sometimes equipped with locks and latches of various levels of difficulty—that an animal must opento get at a treat inside. box for multiple trials to see what the raccoons did. A raccoon taking part in the experiment solves one of the easy levels of the multiaccess puzzle box researchers tested. The experiments took place at night, when raccoons are most active, and researchers watched their exploits via video footage rather than in person to reduce stress on the animals.“Going into it, I was expecting they’ll open one solution, they’ll get the marshmallow out, and then they’ll leave the box alone, and then, when I give it back to them in their next trial with another marshmallow, maybe they’ll open another solution,” says study co-author Hannah Griebling, a Ph.D. candidate in cognitive ecology at the University of British Columbia. But the raccoons went above and beyond, nosing into the alternative solutions practically as soon as they’d nommed their marshmallow, not waiting for a refill. The continued investigations became less common as the solutions to the puzzle box became more complex, but they never fully stopped. Griebling and her colleagues call that continuing work on the puzzle boxes “information foraging”—essentially positing that the raccoons are taking advantage of the opportunity to investigate the additional entry mechanisms in case they run into the same situation in the future. Of course, “we can’t know what they’re thinking; we can only measure their behavior,” Griebling says. But the finding is striking proof that something besides their taste for marshmallows is driving the animals’ continued examination—and that it could be not too different from the kind of curiosity and satisfaction humans experience when problem-solving masquerades as puzzles. “We think there could be some sort of intrinsic motivation for that behavior,” Griebling says. Both Griebling and Stanton note that it would be valuable to repeat the work with wild raccoons, which may be more attuned to the risks of wasting time fiddling around with a lock they can’t figure out how to open. And plenty of humans would appreciate a better understanding of how to convince trash pandas a puzzle isn’t worth investigating any more. If you’re one of them, Griebling’s advice is simple: “Really ensuring that they can’t get into something, instead of potentially giving them more challenges to solve, is probably important.”has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in that two-century history.always educates and delights me, and inspires a sense of awe for our vast, beautiful universe. I hope it does that for you, too., you help ensure that our coverage is centered on meaningful research and discovery; that we have the resources to report on the decisions that threaten labs across the U.S.; and that we support both budding and working scientists at a time when the value of science itself too often goes unrecognized.There has never been a more important time for us to stand up and show why science matters. I hope you’ll support us in that mission.
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