Citation
Food Hoarding in Animals
TL;DR
Scatter-hoarding spreads risk but increases memory and retrieval costs
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