{"id":215143,"date":"2021-03-31T02:10:05","date_gmt":"2021-03-30T23:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/urban-squirrels-how-much-are-we-disturbing-you\/"},"modified":"2021-03-31T02:10:05","modified_gmt":"2021-03-30T23:10:05","slug":"urban-squirrels-how-much-are-we-disturbing-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/urban-squirrels-how-much-are-we-disturbing-you\/","title":{"rendered":"#Urban squirrels, how much are we disturbing you?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Urban squirrels, how much are we disturbing you?<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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\n An urban Eurasian red squirrel and the novel food-extraction task in Tsuda Park at Obihiro. Credit: Pizza Ka Yee Chow
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Human disturbance in urban environments makes some squirrels fail, but others perform better in novel problem-solving.<\/p>\n


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Unlike natural environments, urban areas have artificial buildings, traffics, less greenery and, most prominently, more humans. Despite these seemingly ‘harsh’ or stressful characteristics, some wildlife like the Eurasian red squirrel have chosen to settle down in urban environments, and they thrive. Urban wildlife often show higher behavioral flexibility and increased ability to solve novel problems, and thus can exploit new resources. However, which characteristics of urban environments influence animals’ performance, and their relative importance, have remained unclear.<\/p>\n

In a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B<\/i>, a research team led by Itsuro Koizumi of Hokkaido University set out a novel food-extraction problem for wild Eurasian red squirrels in 11 urban areas in Hokkaido, Japan. This problem contains out-of-reach nuts on levers, and the successful solutions are counterintuitive: a squirrel has to push a lever if it is close to a nut, whereas it has to pull a lever if it is far away from the nut.<\/p>\n

The researchers also recorded the environmental characteristics in each area, including direct human disturbance (mean number of humans present per day), indirect human disturbance (the number of buildings), green coverage, and squirrel’s population size, and then correlated these with squirrels’ novel problem-solving performance.<\/p>\n