lpetrich
Contributor
If one has more than enough food to eat, then a good strategy is to save this excess to eat later, and to keep competition away.
Food preservation is scattered across the animal kingdom. The most notable example is honey. When honeybees visit flowers, they often drink the flowers' nectar, the juice that they make to attract pollinators like bees. They take the juice home in their stomachs and vomit it up into cells in their hives, where it becomes honey. During cold weather or dry weather, the bees then eat the honey.
Another example is why dogs bury bones. Wolves, their wild ancestors, often bury uneaten food to keep it away from scavengers, and they later unearth it and eat it without haivng to do more hunting.
Squirrels bury nuts to get them through winters, and they seem able to remember where they buried their nuts: Do Squirrels Remember Where They Buried Their Nuts? | Scientific American - with burial strategies that can vary by species: burial in one or two spots vs. burial in several spots.
Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs in a variety of other arthropods, like caterpillars, grasshoppers, cockroaches, and spiders. When the grubs hatch out, they then eat their hosts from the inside, often being very careful in what they eat to avoid killing their hosts too soon. Some of these wasps paralyze their prey before laying their eggs on that prey, and some of them drag their prey into burrows.
Sphex - digger wasps - do this.
Needless to say, our species beats all of them, even if we had to learn how to preserve food, as opposed to doing that by instinct. We have also been doing that for millennia, even if earlier evidence is not preserved very much.
Food preservation is scattered across the animal kingdom. The most notable example is honey. When honeybees visit flowers, they often drink the flowers' nectar, the juice that they make to attract pollinators like bees. They take the juice home in their stomachs and vomit it up into cells in their hives, where it becomes honey. During cold weather or dry weather, the bees then eat the honey.
Another example is why dogs bury bones. Wolves, their wild ancestors, often bury uneaten food to keep it away from scavengers, and they later unearth it and eat it without haivng to do more hunting.
Squirrels bury nuts to get them through winters, and they seem able to remember where they buried their nuts: Do Squirrels Remember Where They Buried Their Nuts? | Scientific American - with burial strategies that can vary by species: burial in one or two spots vs. burial in several spots.
Parasitoid wasps lay their eggs in a variety of other arthropods, like caterpillars, grasshoppers, cockroaches, and spiders. When the grubs hatch out, they then eat their hosts from the inside, often being very careful in what they eat to avoid killing their hosts too soon. Some of these wasps paralyze their prey before laying their eggs on that prey, and some of them drag their prey into burrows.
Sphex - digger wasps - do this.
By our standards, this seems very dumb, but for the wasp, it may be good for checking on that burrow in case it also got disturbed.Some Sphex wasps drop a paralyzed insect near the opening of the nest. Before taking provisions into the nest, the Sphex first inspects the nest, leaving the prey outside. During the inspection, an experimenter can move the prey a few inches away from the opening. When the Sphex emerges from the nest ready to drag in the prey, it finds the prey missing. The Sphex quickly locates the moved prey, but now its behavioral "program" has been reset. After dragging the prey back to the opening of the nest, once again the Sphex is compelled to inspect the nest, so the prey is again dropped and left outside during another stereotypical inspection of the nest. This iteration can be repeated several times without the Sphex changing its sequence; by some accounts, endlessly.
Needless to say, our species beats all of them, even if we had to learn how to preserve food, as opposed to doing that by instinct. We have also been doing that for millennia, even if earlier evidence is not preserved very much.