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Squirrels hunting and eating meat

gizmodo.com

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Re: Squirrels hunting and eating meat

#31

Post by ryukoposting »

Loughla wrote: post #18

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.

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.

Re: Squirrels hunting and eating meat

#32

Post by nkrisc »

manquer wrote: post #8
thaumasiotes wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 .

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.

Re: Squirrels hunting and eating meat

#33

Post by jiggawatts »

lostlogin wrote: post #23
WorkerBee28474 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mad cow disease didn’t just happen. Though the idea that cows would preferentially eat brain and spinal cord tissue doesn’t seem likely.

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.

Re: Squirrels hunting and eating meat

#34

Post by xattt »

echelon wrote: post #26
Loughla wrote: post #18

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.

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…

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.

Re: Squirrels hunting and eating meat

#36

Post by aeonik »

zmj wrote: post #2

Everything is an opportunistic carnivore. I once came across a turtle chowing down on a dead frog.

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).

Re: Squirrels hunting and eating meat

#37

Post by tzs »

Loughla wrote: post #18

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.

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.

Re: Squirrels hunting and eating meat

#38

Post by LosEstupidos »

ryukoposting wrote: post #31
Loughla wrote: post #18

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.

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.

[flagged]

Re: Squirrels hunting and eating meat

#40

Post by Loughla »

tzs wrote: post #37
Loughla wrote: post #18

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.

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 i…

They're mostly red squirrels.
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