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- A new study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B adds to a growing body of evidence that raccoons, to the suspected chagrin of their human counterparts, demonstrate innovative problem-solving skills when faced with new foraging challenges.
nature.berkeley.edu/news/2024/07/how-urban-raccoons-adapt-new-foraging-challenges
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Oct 7, 2024 · Raccoons have journeyed from potential subjects in early psychological studies to adaptable residents in our urban landscapes. They’ve captivated both scientists and the public, as well as the viral video realm.
Aug 1, 2024 · A new study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B adds to a growing body of evidence that raccoons, to the suspected chagrin of their human counterparts, demonstrate innovative problem-solving skills when faced with new foraging challenges.
- Overview
- City slinkers
- The making of an “urban warrior”
- Living with “trash pandas”
“Trash pandas” are infamous for living among us, but why are they so good at it?
In the early 1900s, American scientists in the burgeoning field of animal psychology had a grand plan: Bring raccoons, a plentiful North American mammal known for its cleverness, into the lab for experiments on animal intelligence.
They quickly gave up when the dexterous animals with primate-like paws kept breaking out of their cages. The scientists essentially said, “We’re throwing up our hands and going back to rats and pigeons,” chuckles Sarah Benson-Amram, a behavioral ecologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. That’s why, she says, “we’re now only scratching the surface of raccoon cognition.”
Found in most U.S. cities, the masked omnivores are infamous for breaking into trash cans, homes, and other human-made structures. So far, Benson-Amram’s research suggests raccoons’ smarts are contributing to the species’ expansion into suburban and urban areas throughout the North American continent. (Read how wild animals are adapting to city life in surprising ways.)
She and her colleagues have performed various experiments in which they present wild and captive raccoons with demanding tasks, such as learning to push multiple levers to receive a treat. In almost every instance, the animals have defied the team’s expectations—often by coming up with a solution that the scientists hadn’t even imagined.
“They’re endlessly fascinating—every study we do, I’m struck by their curiosity and their willingness to explore things,” Benson-Amram says.
Beyond their intelligence, raccoons possess many qualities suited to city life, from their nocturnal nature, which helps them avoid run-ins with people, to their wide-ranging diet.
For instance, they’ll eat pretty much anything, from fruit to insects to frogs to junk food.
Some raccoons will spend their entire lives in a three-block radius around a dumpster, subsisting off that one artificial food source, says Suzanne MacDonald, a psychologist at York University in Toronto and a National Geographic Explorer who studies urban raccoon cognition.
That’s a big contrast from wild raccoons, which are territorial animals with ranges between 1.5 square miles and nearly 10 miles. “If you can keep alive from one dumpster, that’s your home range. All you have to do is eat, drink, and mate,” she says.
Another boon for raccoons: As temperatures warm worldwide due to climate change, raccoons are predicted to spread even further north into the U.S. and Canada, as well as within countries where they’ve become invasive species, such as Japan and Germany.
Raccoons also have sensitive five-fingered paws for grasping and feeling things, such as slippery aquatic prey. Possibly for that reason, raccoons are especially numerous in temperate cities built around rivers, such as Toronto, Vancouver, and Chicago, MacDonald says. Those flexible paws also give them a unique edge in exploiting the human environment, whether it’s wiggling into the backseat of a car or climbing a skyscraper. “Coyotes can’t live in your attic or garage,” she says, but raccoons can.
Though scientists agree that raccoons are naturally well suited to urban life, a thornier question is whether urban raccoons are evolving over the generations to be smarter than their rural kin. For instance, MacDonald’s research has shown that raccoons in downtown Vancouver can open a trash can secured with a bungee cord, while those in rural environments cannot.
7:02
How our actions are making raccoons smarter
We all know raccoons are cute, but mischievous. They’ve earned a bad reputation from their devious actions in our neighborhoods. But, they’re also extraordinarily smart. So as our homes keep spreading into theirs, raccoons may just be the little critter that’s smart enough to use us and our resources for their own good.
“My hypothesis is that they’re evolving and the urban environment fits their natural characteristics,” MacDonald says. It’s like taking an animal “that’s adaptable and making it even more into an urban warrior.” (See how urban raccoons can escape trash cans.)
Benson-Amram says it’s too early to say whether raccoons are evolving through natural selection because of city life. But it’s entirely possible our attempts to deter them, such as designing raccoon-proof trash cans, are “actually creating smarter animals, because we’re presenting them with increasingly difficult problems to solve.”
Even if they’re adapting to it, city life can be tough for raccoons. Many get hit by cars in their first year of life.
What’s more, mother raccoons, which birth between two and five kits each spring, often face the challenge of finding multiple dens in which to house their young. In suburbs and cities, this often means people’s homes.
Left: Junio Costa, owner of Mr. Raccoon, handles a raccoon kit rescued from an attic in San Francisco. His company is a no-kill wildlife-removal service that specializes in humanely displacing raccoons from the built environment.
Right: Erik Misael Flores Serrano, who works for Mr. Raccoon, cradles a kit that was later reunited with its mother. Female raccoons have strong maternal instincts, and will go to extreme lengths to rescue their young if separated.
That’s why, in recent years, a handful of wildlife-rescue providers across the U.S. have adopted a strategy in which animals such as raccoons, bats, or squirrels are extricated safely from buildings, reunited with their young (if there are any), and prevented from accessing the same building again, says John Griffin, senior director of urban wildlife programs at the Humane Society of the United States in Washington, D.C.
The Humane Society often educates communities on why it’s more ethical to take this so-called eviction-exclusion approach, instead of trapping and killing the animals.
Aug 19, 2023 · Raccoons have a remarkable ability to adapt to changing environments and circumstances at each stage of their growth. From the helplessness of infancy to the independence of adulthood, raccoons exhibit incredible resilience and adaptability. Understanding Raccoon Growth Stages.
Jul 23, 2024 · Humans have long regarded raccoons—renowned for their ability to jimmy their way into locked garbage cans and enter seemingly impassable attics—with a mixture of awe and scorn. But outside of the lab, researchers have little scientific sense of how clever these “trash pandas” really are.
Jun 5, 2024 · This article dives into the intricacies of raccoon habitat preferences, comparing urban and rural settings, examining behavioral adaptations, and highlighting the challenges they face in these environments.
Jul 26, 2024 · To identify how and when innovation arises in urban-dwelling species, we used advanced technologies and new testing and analytical methods to evaluate innovative problem-solving abilities of wild raccoons (Procyon lotor).
