We Come by Hoarding Naturally
The evolution of hoarding in the animal kingdom.
Updated July 5, 2025 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Hoarding didn’t originate with humans. Long before our population began stockpiling an almost unimaginable array of items, animals evolved similar behaviors, though possibly for different reasons.
Across the animal kingdom, hoarding has evolved as a survival strategy, shaped by the pressures of natural selection. From birds and rodents to insects and even marine creatures, excessive accumulation reflects some degree of sophistication.
Different Kinds of Hoarding
Scientists distinguish between two primary forms of animal hoarding: larder hoarding (storing everything in one central place) and scatter hoarding (dispersing caches across multiple sites). These approaches require different cognitive skills. Larder hoarding relies on guarding a single, often conspicuous location, while scatter hoarding demands keen spatial memory and an internal mapping system.
Rodents: Masters of Memory and Stash
Among the most familiar hoarders are rodents, particularly squirrels, mice, and voles. One example is the gray squirrel, which frantically gathers acorns and nuts in the autumn as it prepares for winter. They bury the acorns in individual caches in shallow holes—scatter hoarding. Later, these same squirrels employ visual landmarks and scent cues to retrieve them months later. Gray squirrels remember the locations of up to 80 percent of their caches. Their hippocampus, the brain region associated with memory and navigation, expands during the caching season and shrinks once the task is completed. This reminds me of London cab drivers whose hippocampus is enlarged due to the massive number of streets they have to remember for their jobs. Besides gray squirrels, blue jays, red-breasted nuthatches, and gray jays also utilize scatter hoarding.
Kangaroo rats and packrats maintain centralized larders. They live in a harsh and unpredictable environment; hoarding is not only helpful but also essential for survival. Some species even organize their storage sites, separating seeds from leaves or storing edible material in moisture-retaining burrows to extend freshness.
Birds: Cachers with Complex Cognition
Birds rival rodents in their hoarding prowess, and in some cases, surpass them in cognitive complexity. The Clark’s nutcracker, for example, is a mountain bird that stores up to 30,000 pine seeds each year, spread across thousands of caches, often buried under snow. Remarkably, these birds retrieve most of their seeds many months later, guided by visual memory and environmental cues.
Corvids (jays, crows, and ravens) are of particular interest. Eurasian jays not only cache food but also engage in deception . If they notice another jay observing them, they may pretend to hide a food item while secretly storing it elsewhere. This suggests the possibility of an inherent theory of mind in these animals, the ability to attribute mental states to others, a trait long considered unique to humans.
In captivity, scrub jays have even demonstrated a rudimentary sense of future planning. Those who experienced food deprivation would cache more food for the following day, indicating an awareness of hunger. This behavior contradicts the traditional view that animals live only in the moment. It also suggests that hoarding can involve mental time travel in animals lower on the evolutionary ladder than humans. They can project future needs based on past events.
Insects: Hoarding on Autopilot
While mammals and birds often demonstrate conscious, adaptive hoarding behaviors, insects approach the task with mechanical precision. Leafcutter ants, for example, are known more for their fungal farming than for hoarding per se. They "hoard" food by cultivating a fungus that is their primary food source. Still, other species, like harvester ants, store vast quantities of seeds in elaborate underground chambers. These stores are used to feed the colony during lean times and are even sorted by size and dryness, ensuring the most perishable seeds are eaten first.
Honeybees also engage in a kind of collective hoarding. The golden reserves of honey in a hive represent a managed energy store regulated by worker bees. Here, hoarding takes on a superorganism quality, not for the benefit of an individual, but for the entire hive. The evolution of this behavior reflects not only a survival instinct but also complex social coordination.
Evolutionary Payoffs: Risk, Reward, and Ecology
In evolutionary terms, hoarding is a strategy that strikes a balance between risk and reward. By sacrificing short-term consumption for long-term security, animals increase their chances of surviving unpredictable periods.
Hoarding, of course, also carries costs. Stored food can spoil, be stolen, or forgotten. The act of caching takes time and energy, and maintaining memory maps or defending larders can be taxing cognitively or physically.
Yet, the persistence of hoarding across diverse animal species suggests it offers overall advantages. For example, in temperate zones with stark seasonal contrasts, hoarding can mean the difference between life and death. In social species, such as bees or pack rats, it may enhance group fitness. And in environments where competition is fierce and resources are limited, hoarding can confer a vital edge.
Although I concentrate here on nonhuman animals, it’s impossible to ignore the reverberation within our species. Humans hoard for survival, too, stockpiling grain, fuel, or wealth. We are different than animals, though; we also hoard for psychological reasons, for example, nostalgia . In specific cases, hoarding becomes pathological and is no longer driven by a need for storage. Nevertheless, the roots of this behavior lie deep in the evolutionary past, a shared inheritance with birds, rodents, and insects.
Hoarding in the animal kingdom is a strategy that has been perfected over millions of years. It is not just a survival tactic; it suggests intelligence , memory, and adaptation. In understanding it, we come closer to understanding ourselves.
The history of scatter hoarding studies . Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Journals. 2010. A. Brodin
Assessing hoarding in mice. Nature Protocols. 2006. R.M.J. Deacon
Preston, S. D., Kringelbach, M. L., & Knutson, B. (Eds.). (2014). The interdisciplinary science of consumption . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Preston, S. D., & Jacobs, L. F. (2009). Mechanisms of cache decision making in fox squirrels (Sciurus niger). Journal of Mammalogy , 90 (4), 787-795.
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Shirley M. Mueller, M.D., is a neuroscientist board certified in neurology and psychiatry. She is also an avid collector. Combining these two disciplines, she wrote Inside the Head of a Collector: Neuropsychological Forces at Play.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.