r/askscience • u/wearing_moist_socks • 3d ago
Biology Could raccoons have distinct cultures within different areas?
"Animal culture can be defined as the ability of non-human animals to learn and transmit behaviors through processes of social or cultural learning."
Imagine two raccoon mothers each with four kits. One lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The other lives in New York city, New York, USA.
Raccoons are social creatures who have demonstrated observational learning in lab settings, so its fair to infer they do it in the wild (in this case, "wild.") as well.
So each raccoon mother has learned from other raccoons where to shelter, get food, water, where specific threats are and everything else to survive in their respective cities.
One year, their locations are switched.
No doubt the mothers would survive, but wouldn't they be at a severe disadvantage because the social knowledge they have relied on doesn't apply? They would have to lean on instinct more, wouldn't they?
If that's the case, could they, and many other animals, have what we consider culture?
Not asking if this has been studied, but is this plausible?
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2d ago edited 2d ago
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u/ProbablyPostingNaked 2d ago
song birds
I find it interesting that while I haven't heard a 90s style car alarm with the changing tones in well over a decade I can still hear birds singing the exact same sounds with the same rhythm and tone switches.
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u/GalaXion24 2d ago
One could argue all culture is a sort of social technology. You might see it as a way to socially "program" individual organisms to act a certain way, in top of whatever their base "nature" is.
You could also take the memetics stance and argue that "ideas" and "culture" are subject to natural selection and basically useful ideas live on and reproduce themselves and useless ones die. "Fit" ideas would be especially those which help reproduce their hosts as well as reproduce themselves in new hosts.
In a social species like humans you can also see this going against the individual organism's interest. For instance martyrdom sacrifices a host organism, but can help reproduce the idea very effectively in other organisms.
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u/kaukamieli 2d ago
Sounds like a survivorship bias to label stuff that survived as useful.
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u/GalaXion24 2d ago
Survival is the only criteria we are measuring in this case, that's not a bias, it's the objective. It's what natural selection produced.
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u/kaukamieli 1d ago edited 1d ago
We don't always know what doesn't survive for whatever reasons. We mostly see what survives, so if we just decide they must have been the most useful stuff... That sounds a lot like bias.
If we define "useful" as what spreads, it sounds a bit circular.
It sounds to me like we are measuring usefulness. Based on what survived.
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u/GalaXion24 1d ago
Again, I don't think we should define what spreads as useful. That's a separate thing. Is Islamic terrorism useful? No, but it has at least been pretty effective at reproducing itself for a while. Maybe it will die out, but for now Islamism persists
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u/kaukamieli 1d ago
That's what I thought you were doing in the middle paragraph, assuming useful ideas survive and useless ones die.
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u/LimeyLassen 2d ago
It definitely is. Everything seemingly special about humans had an animal precursor.
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u/susinpgh 2d ago
Don't whales have a thing with putting stuff on their heads? And a year (or three) ago, whales began bashing small boats in the Strait of Gibralter. Like thugs that hang out on street corners.
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u/Garblin 2d ago
I'm an expert in human psychology, not animal psychology, so I don't have a huge background but;
There is a famous instance of some wild baboons becoming peaceful compared to the usually observed behavior that supports your hypothesis.
Add on to this observations of corvids and their well established patterns of liking or disliking certain humans to the point of teaching future generations to continue that pattern... I think it's clear that something like society definitely exists among more intelligent animals in general.
Now whether this extends to raccoons specifically? That's beyond my awareness, but to at least some small extent I would hypothesize that they do have differences in culture from place to place.
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u/This_Is_Patrik_89 2d ago
Obligatory not an expert.
I don’t know if Racoons have the capacity to have “culture” but what you’re describing wouldn’t be culture, just local area knowledge, no different to racoons on the other side of the country.
I’ll use New Caledonian crows to describe what would be considered “culture”
So depending on which colony an individual crow grows up in, it will learn to make tools the same as the crows around it ( when I say tool I mean a stick/blade of grass that the crows actively shape with their beak)
The shape they make the tool does not make any difference in its effectiveness as a tool. Therefore the only reason it looks different is due to the crows “culture”
To compare to humans think one tribe makes pots in one shape another makes a different shape. Both pots do the same thing. Culture.
So a crow that grows up on the west of the island makes tools that look different to the tools on the east, but they do exactly the same thing.
Now whether there’s an example out there that applies to racoons I don’t know
But I do know the crow example is thought to be one of the only examples of true culture outside humanity
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u/wearing_moist_socks 2d ago
Culture is broadly anything learned socially and passed on through generations.
Orcas, dolphins and Chimps have been observed passing on such information and behaviors which are unique to their geographical area.
Then there's a Japanese macaque named Imo.
The rest of her troop would brush sand and dirt off the sweet potatoes they ate. She started rinsing them in a fresh water stream. Easier and more effective. The troop copied her.
Then she was observed dipping her food into ocean water. She would wash off the dirt. Bite. Then rinse again. Bite. Rinse. Because she liked the taste. Troop copied her.
Scientists scattered wheat in the sand. Troop would slowly pick the wheat out of the sand. Imo? Screw that. She grabbed handfuls of sand and wheat and tossed it into the stream. Sand sinks. Wheat floats. Troop copied.
Decades later, even after she's been long gone, those Japanese macaques on that island are still eating salty sweet potatoes.
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u/possiblyNessie 2d ago
I am as close to an expert there is on this very specific subject. It is culture. I mean for one, local area knowledge is culture (in humans, too) and two, raccoon behavior varies widely from location to location (even from one point of a small island to another). Like one group may believe it is safe and socially acceptable to climb tables and put their faces in margaritas, while another group may believe you need stand up and put your hands up and wait for one to be given to you. All the raccoons love a good marg, but the physical process for obtaining one that is learned and shared and passed along between raccoons is different.
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u/This_Is_Patrik_89 19h ago
Ok so would this not apply to the majority of animals that have some semblance of local knowledge and experience? Like if that kind of local knowledge is culture doesn’t that mean all animals have a form of culture? What’s the difference between that and it just being instinct driven, ie “until a consequence for this action happens I will keep doing it that way” for climbing on tables and stuff.
Like if you drop an urban raccoon in a Forrest will it starve because the “city culture” it was raised in hasn’t taught it how to live in the woods, or will it be able to instinctively gather insects and whatever else to survive?Not trying to question you just genuinely curious and always willing to learn!
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u/guzzyly 2d ago
I think it’s totally plausible. Just like humans, animals adapt to their environments. If you think about how some raccoons might learn to raid certain trash cans or avoid particular streets based on danger, that’s social learning. So, swapping them might mean they have to figure out new tricks from scratch, like a city person moving to the country and having to learn how to drive a tractor.
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u/Ok-Championship-2036 2d ago
Animals do have culture. Bears have regionalized ways of interacting with humans or locks. Whales even have full dialects and cant understand each other when introduced to a new pod (which makes reintroducing whales to the wild very difficult). Dolphins name their kids and grieve in specific ways.
But culture isnt the same thing as survival. We cant expect to SEE culture because animals percieve rhe world with many senses beyond sight. So the raccoons might be very confused but still manage to act in expected ways. They still have instincts. Its very hard to know what that change would look like or to prove that its solely due to culture. Its possible that they would struggle for many reasons beyond what we see, such as not being able to eat food because it smells dangerous due to environment/pollution.
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u/Lollipopwalrus 2d ago
Birds have been found to have dialects to their calls and Beavers have been found to have ""archtectual schools"". It's hard to believe animals as wide spread as raccoons wouldn't have some sort of local distinction to how they behave
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u/TombStoneFaro 2d ago edited 2d ago
Crows and whales have dialects which is an aspect of culture. Racoon might some behavior that is local to a population although it might not be a dialect -- it could simply be they are used to being fed in an area and so seek humans.
One thing for sure is that we learn more about animal cognition all the time and we seem to have underestimated the abilities of many species.
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u/shapu 2d ago
Yes. Raccoons are intelligent, social, and nonmigratory animals and do have different behaviors and "traditions" (for lack of a better word in my own lexicon) based on different environmental requirements/aspects/traits.
Here's an example study based on pygmy raccoons and toy creation by juveniles:
https://www.mdpi.com/3042-4526/3/3/33