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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

> Dynastic inheritors have achieved lifetime financial independence the moment they emerged from the womb, while others have arrived, facing a hell-hole during their early life or, worse, disabling physical or mental infirmities that rob them of what I have taken for granted. In many heavily-populated parts of the world, I would likely have had a miserable life and my sisters would have had one even worse.

Yes, this sounds unfair to our individualist ear. However, I am also cognizant that there could be another lens that is more top down, not acknowledging our sense of individuality, but rather a layer at the species level with crests and troughs distributed and fluctuating across the individuals that come into existence and whose offspring HAS to be affected by the uneven environment in which they find themselves.

An organic feature of the natural world?

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What other creatures show this kind of hoarding pattern in nature?

Storing more of a thing than can (reasonably) be used in hundreds, or thousands of lifetimes?

I don't know of any (others) that do so, and then pass the hoard down through the generations.

Chipmunks and Squirrels.

Do they hoard unnecessarily, or do they hoard what they need to get through winter months, without much surplus?

They hoard instinctively. They can't count; they don't have a sense of "this is enough."

They hoard until it gets too cold, then they hibernate/hunker down until it gets warm.

Squirrels don't really hoard in the sense trillionaires do ("gathering a great quantity for one's own private collection"), they take seeds and bury them all over the place, which is meaning #2 in the dictionary ("save in one's mind for a future need or use"). The squirrel and other animals eat them later, the 50+% nobody finds to eat can take root. That way, squirrels play an important role in seed dispersal for many species of tree.

I suppose the trillionaire analogy would be they themselves investing money.

I remember reading recently that it had been disproved that squirrels can actually remember where they bury all their nuts and seeds. Maybe some, but quite a lot they cannot.

They end up eating food buried by other squirrels as well as their own.

you're splitting hairs. Squirrels evolve to save more food for themselves, everything else is an accident

In my view the effects on the ecosystem are way more important than whatever pressure creates a behavior. For both squirrels and trillionaires.

what political and social pressures are squirrels under that trigger them to gather food for other animals?

No, you're ascribing will to a blind and undirected process. Squirrels that survive in recent years and decades bury more food than they ever eat, whether that specifically helped them against certain selection pressures or whether it vestigially remains as a non-impacting behavior.

I've heard that a lot of trees are grown from forgotten squirrel seed stashes. So at the very least they do store more than they eat.

And over the long term it compounds to more food for their descendants through the buy and forget investments (the trees that sprout out of the stashes).

Very much the former.

> What other creatures show this kind of hoarding pattern in nature?

Acorn woodpeckers, beavers, and corvids exhibit true, generational hoarding behavior.

Younger generations learn and maintain the same caches, structures, or techniques as their elders.

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