Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Animals encounter a variety of food items and must determine their value and preservability. How such assessments are made in natural contexts remains largely unknown. Here, we dissect how agoutis—a critical Neotropical seed disperser—decide whether to immediately consume or preserve food in small independent caches, i.e. scatter-hoard. Agoutis preferentially cached nuts over fresh fruits and underwent a sharp transition from eating to scatter-hoarding, a clear shift towards future oriented decision-making. Remarkably, they cached empty nuts with intact shells but consumed filled nuts with damaged shells, revealing that shell integrity, rather than immediate nutritional content, determines the decision to scatter-hoard. This decision depended on oro-manual food assessment, an ecological information-seeking behavior. Agoutis used their lips and incisors—a somatosensory fovea—to systematically navigate nut surfaces, accumulating decision-critical sensory information about shell integrity. Together, these findings provide a mechanistic account of preservability assessment in a wild rodent, revealing how information-seeking behaviors support long-term value optimization in natural environments.
Language: English
Topic: Primate Behavior and Ecology
Domain: Life Sciences
SDG: Zero hunger
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7214345399