“We have to do something only our hands do.” The receptacles have a lever that can be opened only with an opposable thumb, which raccoons lack. But it’s entirely possible our attempts to deter them, such as designing raccoon-proof trash cans, are “actually creating smarter animals, because we’re presenting them with increasingly difficult problems to solve.”įor instance, MacDonald recently advised the city of Toronto on a new line of raccoon-proof trash cans. It’s like taking an animal “that’s adaptable and making it even more into an urban warrior.” (See how urban raccoons can escape trash cans.)īenson-Amram says it’s too early to say whether raccoons are evolving through natural selection because of city life.
“My hypothesis is that they’re evolving and the urban environment fits their natural characteristics,” MacDonald says. So as our homes keep spreading into theirs, raccoons may just be the little critter that’s smart enough to use us and our resources for their own good. They’ve earned a bad reputation from their devious actions in our neighborhoods. We all know raccoons are cute, but mischievous. For instance, MacDonald’s research has shown that raccoons in downtown Vancouver can open a trash can secured with a bungee cord, while those in rural environments cannot. Though scientists agree that raccoons are naturally well suited to urban life, a thornier question is whether urban raccoons are evolving over the generations to be smarter than their rural kin. “They demonstrated unique and flexible ways of getting the marshmallow reward out that have not been observed in other species-and that I did not anticipate myself,” says Stanton. Not only did two raccoons correctly drop the stones, a third changed her strategy entirely and came up with her own solution by knocking over the cylinder to get to the marshmallows-an example of the species’ ability to think outside the box. In the experiment, an animal must drop stones into a water-filled cylinder to raise the fluid level and make floating treats-in this case, marshmallows-rise to the surface. student in Benson-Amram’s lab, presented captive raccoons with the Aesop’s Fable test, a classic measure of intelligence. In a 2017 study, Lauren Stanton, then a Ph.D.
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(Read National Geographic 's series on urban wildlife, “Wild Cities.”) Of course, that combination of curiosity and innovativeness can often lead to new food sources that a less timid animal would likely never discover.
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