Food caching

Food caching is the storage of food in concealed locations for later consumption. It helps animals bridge periods when food is scarce or unpredictable.

Scatter hoarding: A caching strategy in which an animal stores food in many separate locations. Many animals reduce the risk of losing an entire food supply by dividing it among hiding places.
Clark's nutcracker: A North American corvid that stores pine seeds in numerous caches and later recovers many of them. Its seed caches support survival through winter and provide a classic case of spatial memory.
Seasonality: Predictable changes in environmental conditions and resource availability over the course of a year. Seasonal food shortages make stored food valuable during periods of scarcity.
Seed dispersal: The movement of seeds away from their parent plants, enabling potential establishment elsewhere. Forgotten seed caches can germinate and transport plants to new locations.
Larder hoarding: A caching strategy in which an animal stores food together in one or a few protected sites. This concentrates cached food, making storage and defense different from scatter hoarding.
Western scrub-jay: A California corvid known for caching food and adjusting storage behavior to its perishability and social setting. Experiments with this bird have examined memory for what was cached, where, and when.
Optimal foraging theory: A framework for predicting how animals choose feeding strategies that maximize benefits relative to costs. Caching balances the future benefit of stored food against retrieval and guarding costs.
Mutualism: An ecological interaction in which organisms of different species benefit from one another. When animals fail to recover caches, plants can benefit from the resulting seed dispersal.
Spatial memory: Memory for the locations and spatial relationships of places and objects. Recovering dispersed caches often depends on remembering where food was hidden.
Eurasian red squirrel: A tree squirrel that stores seeds and nuts in caches, especially to help meet winter food needs. Its caching illustrates how a mammal manages a variable supply of seeds.

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