Dr Jennifer Smith
Appearances
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
This behavior is completely shocking to us. I have been watching these animals year after year for over a decade. We've never seen any active hunting from the species. This past summer, though, in June, when they started doing this behavior, they just kept going.
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
Well, it's actually, in keeping with some of the biology that we know about these animals, they are opportunistic omnivores. It was really this active hunting that was quite striking and different from what we've seen in the past. And there are these accounts of other squirrels, including the red squirrels, the gray squirrels, European ground squirrels, that...
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
have taken a sparrow on an occasion and that's been published before so there's some inklings of this behavior happening but never on this extent this large scale.
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
So I've actually spent a great deal of my adult life studying hunting behavior in large carnivores And I never in a million years thought that we might see a similar kind of behavior in ground squirrels that are cute and fuzzy and cooperative and all of these things. What they do is there's two styles of hunting behaviors that we see in the wild.
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
And one is to sit and wait, stalk like a cat might do. And that is not what they're doing. They're actually taking this other strategy of hunting behavior, which is to just wait Target an animal, chase it down. It's a little bit clumsy. They go after, in this case, a California vole, another small rodent. And they often go for the head. They bite down on the neck.
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
And if they're successful, then they start crunching down onto the skull and they eat the entire animal, picking off meat from the bones, etc. It sometimes takes a couple of goes. They might chase after the vole. And the bull may get away. And the bull also has teeth, so it may bite back. And then if they're successful, then they will start eating their prey item.
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
Right. We're really, really curious to see whether they're cooperative in this. We had a couple of cases where some young animals were doing this. It looked a little bit more like play behavior at first. And then one of them would actually take down the vole and start eating it. We did often see competitive interactions after the kill happened.
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
But it didn't last for terribly long because the vole is a pretty small snack and they'd often just eat it very quickly or take it down into their burrow.
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
Absolutely. It's all relative. So for us, a vole is about the size of our finger. For a ground squirrel, that's about the size of a New York City rat or something. For them, that is an amazing pulse of nutrition coming in. And so we're really interested in understanding if that actually is going to influence their reproduction. Because in rodents, more food going in means more babies coming out.
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
So that's what we're really excited to see next.
Global News Podcast
Murder suspect Luigi Mangione faces charges in New York court
Also in this podcast... This behaviour is completely shocking to us. I have been watching these animals year after year for over a decade. We've never seen any active hunting from the species.