Have you ever been on a summer vacation and started looking at houses to stay during Christmas? Well, porcupines do that too! Except they go on vacation during the wintertime and search during the summer.
North American Porcupines (Erethizon dorsatum) do this thing called “scouting” where during the summertime, when they have plenty of food to eat, they walk around and look for places that would be nice to live during the winter when they won’t have as much food or they need a home that is better for the cold weather. They have to use their imagination, and any animal can scout! They are more likely to do so when their food supply is severely restricted in one season more than another, and when their winter homes are not too close to their summer homes.
Before this research in Northern California, scientists thought porcupines were randomly moving around in the summer and looking for more food, water, or even friends! They now understand that they are actually moving around to learn more about the places that might make it easier for them to survive in the wintertime. Something interesting about the porcupines is that they need different things during the summer than they do in the winter. In the summer, spring, and fall they eat anything that they can to fatten up as much for the winter as possible. However, in the winter, they don’t have a lot to eat and must carefully choose so that they don’t eat plants that could hurt them while getting the most nutrients. After learning all this about porcupines scientists thought that porcupines don’t just choose where their homes are randomly but take time to learn where they should live next!
Researchers tested their thinking by attaching trackers to porcupines and placing cameras in potential winter habitats to see what resources were there and how often each one would visit a certain place. They didn’t get to test many individual’s movements but with the data they collected there was a pattern of porcupines scouting during the summer to select future habitats. They seemed to find that girl porcupines are also more likely to scout than boy porcupines but again, they didn’t get to test that many so there needs to be more testing done!
Overall, these scientists taught us that porcupines are smart enough to know that they need to search in the summer for a place to live in the winter because if they wait they will probably not have enough food to get them through their journey, especially if it snows! The scientists also tell us that they don’t know all the answers for sure but that they, and others, will keep trying to figure out the pattern of scouting because maybe more animals are doing it and we don’t even know!
Belamaric, P. N., Appel, C. L., & Bean, W. T. (2024). A new search behaviour: Porcupines scout for winter habitat during summer. Animal Behaviour, 212, 137–148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.03.007
