Cities are attractive to a lot of people. Many creatures are 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- 888-609- Some creatures are better suited for living in the city.
Learning from situations and adapting to change are among the cognitive abilities that are important for urban wildlife. The success of the urban colonist, the raccoon, has taken North American cities by storm.
While studying for her PhD at the University of Wyoming, she embarked on an ambitious program with other people.
The animals were taken to the lab to assess their health and how feisty or submissive they were, after they were captured using live traps and cat food. She injected a tiny radio Frequency ID tag between the animals' shoulder blades to individually identify them before returning the animals to their home territories to record their impulsivity.
The team tested how well the wild raccoons learned and adapted to change by setting up a small cubicle in the animals' neighborhood and releasing a few dog food treats.
The team switched the tables on the animals to see how quickly they figured out which button to use to get the dog food reward. She admits that she and her colleagues didn't take into account how popular the raccoon cubicle would be, with several animals trying to crowd inside at the same time, bumping and distract the animal at the console as it tried to get its dog food treat.
27 raccoons got the hang of visiting the cubicle after two years, with 19 figuring out how to press the buttons, and 17 realizing that they had to depress the other button when the team tried to outfox them. When the researchers switched the console buttons, the adults were better prepared for adversity than the youngest raccoons. A potential relationship between emotional reactivity and cognitive ability was found when they checked the temperaments of the animals.
The captive animals seemed to pick up the test more readily when compared to the wild animals, likely because there were more distraction and interruption during testing.
Wildlife managers should beware of going after more proactive, bold individuals as calmer, more submissive individuals may be the true criminal masterminds, warns the team.
More information: Environmental, individual and social traits of free-ranging raccoons influence performance in cognitive testing, Journal of Experimental Biology (2022). DOI: 10.1242/jeb.244806 Journal information: Journal of Experimental Biology
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