Food Hoarding in Animals
TL;DR
Scatter-hoarding spreads risk but increases memory and retrieval costs
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This comprehensive treatise on food hoarding behavior across animal species provides the foundational framework for understanding storage strategies in nature. Vander Wall's work establishes the distinction between scatter-hoarding (distributed caching) and larder-hoarding (centralized storage) that forms the basis of the chapter's biological analysis.
The book documents storage behavior across hundreds of species, demonstrating that the trade-offs between distributed and centralized storage are universal evolutionary solutions to resource scarcity.
Key Findings from Wall (1990)
- Scatter-hoarding spreads risk but increases memory and retrieval costs
- Larder-hoarding reduces costs but concentrates risk
- Storage strategies correlate with environmental predictability and resource distribution
- Cache recovery rates vary by species, habitat, and storage strategy