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Comment by pvaldes | Hacker News Reader

Squirrel can't stop and will not stop. Needs the vault to survive in winter. The man could consider to put a big squirrel box near on a tree from the garden and put all the nuts inside. That would made a nice Christmas history.

Is amazing how many nuts the squirrel has harvested.

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Not just winter.

Oaks produce huge numbers of acorns about one season every 7 years. My yard had thousands and thousands a few years ago, for example, but very few since. Oaks seem to do this to overwhelm squirrels and ensure that a few acorns manage to germinate. Squirrels that can save acorns for years will do much better than squirrels that can only save enough for each winter.

Lots of tree species do this. They sync up and every few years overwhelm whatever eats their seeds.

So the same prey saturation strategy as cicadas? I wonder if that also produces a prime-number cycle preference

Phenological event known as "masting": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mast_(botany)

Similarly, periodical cicadas synchronously emerge in great numbers (more 370 per square meter) every 13th or 17th year.[1] This overwhelms predators and it's thought that the prime-numbered intervals prevent predators from synchronizing their reproductive cycles with that of the cicadas.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas

Sort of hilariously overkill. Was the little guy really gonna chow down on thousands of nuts each of which is probably a days meal for him?

Maybe they got a family to feed

Just trying to imagine the angry spousal argument over the nuts in squirrel

Probably saving for retirement.

We have humans that save billions of US dollars, so this overkill behavior is not exclusive to squirrels.

No because humans can spend that money on things. Squirrels can't eat more than they can eat.

Nobody saw the new ice age coming. Nobody except Matthew, the red squirrel...

All the lady squirrels gonna be coming over to his crib for Squirrelflix + walnuts.

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