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Opening Arguments

Nuts

Either we've run out of exotic animals to study in the wild, or we have a whole new, lazier breed of biologists:

Squirrels hit the genetic lottery with their chubby cheeks and bushy tails. It's hard to imagine picnickers tossing peanuts and cookies at the rodents if they looked like rats.

But good looks alone don't get you through Chicago winters. Nor do they help negotiate a treacherous landscape of hungry cats, cars and metal traps.

So how do they do it? And why do they search, huddle, dart, and sometimes forget where they hid their nuts?

Joel Brown aims to find out.

"We're trying to get a glimpse of what your life is like if you are a city squirrel," said Brown, a biologist at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

He and a team of students will trap squirrels in Chicago and its suburbs this winter, taking skin samples for DNA analysis. They'll strap collars on them and watch what they do. And they'll attach threads to acorns and hazelnuts, then see where the squirrels take them and when they eat them.

Don't think this study is Movie of the Week material. ("Tracking the crafty city squirrels, Brown and his team sometimes had to eke out an existence in a Winebego on lonely side streets for days at a time, their only nourishment Twinkies and lukewarm bottles of Mountain Dew!") I have a friend with a better question than, "Why do they sometimes forget where they hid their nuts?" Why is it always her attic they get trapped in?

Posted in: Current Affairs
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