Thursday, November 12th, 2026, 5:53 pm
Dead Animals
Filed under: From today’s Techrights Daily Links:
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Best squirrels trade a long life for an early reproduction
Age at primiparity plays a crucial role in population dynamics and life-history evolution. Long-term data on female North American red squirrels were analysed to study the fitness consequences of delaying first reproduction. Early breeders were born earlier, had a higher breeding success and achieved a higher lifetime reproductive success than females who delayed their first reproduction, which suggests a higher quality of early breeders. However, early breeders had similar mass when tagged, and similar number of food caches available at one year of age as late breeders. Nevertheless, we found evidence of survival costs of early primiparity. Early breeders had a lower survival between one and two years of age than late breeders and a lower lifespan. Our study points out that two reproductive tactics co-occurred in this population: a tactic based on early maturity at the cost of a lower survival versus a tactic based on delayed maturity and long lifespan. High quality individuals express the most profitable tactic by breeding early whereas low quality individuals do the best of a bad job by delaying their first reproduction.
e are still talking about the squirrels today. There are so many of them out there this year. One of them died this week. A friend amused me with: “Q: What did the mother squirrel say to the baby squirrels? A: Be sure to run BOTH ways when crossing the road.”
“Squirrels do what squirrels do,” he said, “and are basically impossible to dodge when they do finally decide to hop under the wheels of a rolling vehicle. We’ve been lucky to have very few squirrels at the feeder so far this year. There are increasing numbers of birds though.
He added that “squirrels have unique personalities and apparently unique priorities, however they breed in astronomical quantities and the reason for that – the reason for their spastic behavior: the crazier they act, the bigger the evolutionary jackpot is when one of them ‘succeeds’ even if it is a one off for a single generation, they do all sorts of stupid things and many (most) die as a direct result but some succeed and do rather well
as far as offspring go and the occasional squirrel will succeed overwhelmingly and be placed to have an excessive amount of progeny. Thus ensuring an ongoing supply of kamikaze squirrels and other bizarre behavior from them…”
Today at the park we saw many walking high up, climbing horizontally and vertically on very tall tree branches (maybe 20 meters above ground). There was water below.
The friend added “trivia: they don’t know where they hide seeds and nuts; their search patterns are kind of hard wired and rather hereditary so when one which many large caches
passes on, its immediated descendants have a high chance of ‘stumbling upon’ the immediately previous generation’s uncollected cache.”
I am still sad about the dead one we saw. Rianne was going to collect the body for burial, but someone else had beaten her to it.
Today when fed many species of birds and water birds (even 5 squirrels) at the park we still spoke about the dead squirrel.
All squirrels are adorable to look at when they eat (or grasp food)
It’ll probably persist with us or stay in our minds for quite some time to come.
Earlier on there was a related incident. Rianne ‘buried’ a bird today, seeing that nobody else would do so (unlike with the squirrel). The dead bird was in town for a number of days already, lying on the pavement.
Rianne hates seeing dead animals, not just squirrels and birds. She keeps wanting to give them burial of some kind; we are surprised people just walk past them for days…
“People will walk past dead or dying people in the city, not just animal corpses,” the friend told me.
