Over half the people in the world live in cities, and new city areas are being constructed all the time. To make new roads and buildings, we remove natural areas that animals live in, like forests and rivers. This can be harmful to the animals that used to live there, but sometimes the animals move into the new city the same way you and I do. When they do this, how do they find food?
To investigate this, researchers decided to look at foxes because they live all over the world. They focused on 2 big questions. Do foxes that live in cities find more creative food sources than foxes that live in the wild? And do foxes make problems for people by going through their trash?
To test this, the scientists made machines that would only give food to the foxes if they moved the right pieces. One of the machines opened like a trash can, one of them required the fox to slide the top off, one had a stick blocking the food that the fox had to move, and one required the fox to break through a foil wall to get to the food. There were 4 other machines that involved combinations of these actions. Because foxes don’t wear collars with name tags like pet dogs do, there was no way to tell the foxes apart. This means that if a fox approached the machine, it was by its own choice. The scientists left food out for 2 weeks at a time because the trash is collected every 2 weeks.
The scientists set up cameras across from the machines so that they could see when a fox was near it. They watched to see if the fox touched the machine, and to see if the fox got the food. The foxes were able to get food out of some of the machines, like the one in the picture, but some of the machines were too complicated for the foxes.
There is not a very good way to study why foxes might be braver in a city than in a forest, so the study focused on whether or not foxes were braver in the city. The researchers counted foxes as brave if they touched the machine. They also wanted to know if foxes were more creative in finding food if they lived in a city. If the foxes got the food out of the machine, then it counted as creative food access. The researchers also had to keep track of how much food was in the feeder. If there was no food inside the machine, then the fox might have avoided solving the puzzle.
The researchers found that city foxes were braver than country foxes, and were more likely to touch the machines. City foxes were not likely to get the food reward, and were not more creative in finding food than other foxes. This made the researchers wonder if there is enough food in cities that the foxes could find food somewhere else. Maybe somewhere that does not require as much thinking.
References:
“Urban Foxes Are Bolder but Not More Innovative than Their Rural Conspecifics.” Animal Behaviour, vol. 203, Sept. 2023, pp. 101–13. www-sciencedirect-com.libproxy.kenyon.edu, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2023.07.003.
