These Animals Hide Dead Bodies to Eat Them Later

Many animals have developed unique behaviors to ensure their survival, and one such behavior is food hoarding. From squirrels hiding nuts to mountain lions saving part of a kill for later, storing food for future use is a widespread and adaptive strategy. A particularly fascinating form of hoarding is carcass caching. This remarkable survival strategy is observed in various animal species, where individuals store or hide the remains of dead animals for future consumption. This caching, or hoarding, behavior not only enhances food security but also protects these valuable resources from competitors and scavengers, ensuring that animals can access nutrition during periods of scarcity.

Which Animals Engage in Carcass Caching?

Many animals utilize carcass caching as a survival tactic. Let’s explore several of those animals. 

Badgers

Badgers are feisty little animals. They are known for their strength and digging abilities. Using their strong forelimbs and sharp claws, they can dig extensive holes and cover the remains entirely, effectively caching them underground. This behavior serves as a crucial survival strategy, allowing badgers to store food and return to it over days or even weeks. By preserving their kill in this way, badgers ensure a reliable food supply during harsh conditions, when prey is scarce, or when foraging becomes difficult due to weather or other environmental pressures. 

Coyotes

Highly adaptable and resourceful, coyotes exhibit a remarkable hunting and foraging strategy that contributes to their long-term survival. Coyotes often cache smaller carcasses or leftover parts of larger prey, storing them for future consumption when food is scarce. This behavior demonstrates both foresight and efficiency. Their opportunistic feeding habits enable them to exploit a wide range of food sources, including small mammals, insects, fruits, and even human refuse. This dietary flexibility allows coyotes to thrive in diverse environments, from densely populated urban areas to remote rural landscapes.

Crows

Among the most intelligent birds, crows demonstrate advanced caching behaviors. Crows have been observed caching fish, clams, pecans, corn, frogs, snakes, carrion, and dung. What makes their caching particularly impressive is their ability to use advanced cognitive skills to remember the locations of numerous hidden food stashes, sometimes spread across large areas. They use spatial memory, landmarks, and even the sun’s position to locate these caches later. In addition to securing meals during times of scarcity, this behavior plays an important role in their social interactions. Crows are known to watch each other cache food, and sometimes steal from one another.

Wolves

Wolves often engage in caching behavior, storing the remains of their kills in multiple locations to preserve food for future use. This practice is particularly common in summer when wolves forage alone or in small groups. According to Defenders.org, this strategy helps protect valuable meat from scavengers such as ravens, foxes, and other opportunistic animals. By burying portions of a kill in the dirt or covering them with leaves and debris, wolves can effectively hide and preserve their surplus food. Remarkably, they may cache anything from a small scrap to as much as 15 pounds of meat from a single meal. This behavior not only ensures a steady food supply during times of scarcity or when hunting is unsuccessful but also reflects the wolf’s adaptability and planning capabilities.

Grizzly Bears

Grizzly bears are known for their remarkable caching habits, which showcase both their strength and strategic approach to securing food. When grizzlies make a large kill, such as an elk, moose, or even a bison, they often bury the carcass under a combination of leaves, dirt, branches, and sometimes snow. Large prey typically needs to be consumed over multiple days, and caching helps preserve the meat by keeping it cool and shielded from sunlight, slowing decomposition. It also conceals the carcass from scavengers like wolves, coyotes, ravens, and even other bears, reducing the risk of losing a valuable food source. Since such prey cannot be eaten all at once, caching allows grizzlies to return over several days or even longer to feed at their own pace. This behavior is especially crucial in the lead-up to hibernation, when bears must build significant fat reserves to sustain them through the winter months.

Pumas

Pumas, also known as cougars or mountain lions, are solitary large carnivores known for their stealth, strength, and resourcefulness. These big cats often hide their kills in dense underbrush, rocky areas, or even caves, effectively concealing their meals from scavengers and other predators. This strategy reflects their solitary nature, as pumas do not benefit from the cooperative hunting tactics seen in pack predators like wolves. Instead, they rely on their own strength and cunning to bring down prey that often includes deer, elk, and smaller mammals.

These big cats are solitary, large carnivores that exhibit high energetic investments while hunting prey that often takes multiple days to consume. To ensure that their food supply is not stolen by scavengers like bears, wolves, or coyotes, pumas often drag their kills to secluded spots and hide them. By caching their food in this way, they also protect it from the elements and help prevent decomposition, allowing them to return to the meal over multiple days as needed.

Reasons for Carcass Caching

This strategy of caching helps them protect their food from other predators and ensures a reliable food source. The reasons behind carcass caching are multifaceted and critical for survival. Caching food for later retrieval is vital for many animals’ survival, but little is known about how this behavior varies among individuals in the wild.

• Food Security: By storing food, animals create a reliable source of nutrition during lean times. Caching can be particularly important in ecosystems where food availability is unpredictable due to seasonal changes or environmental fluctuations.
• Protection from Competitors: Caching allows animals to safeguard their food from other scavengers, which can be vital in competitive environments where multiple species may vie for limited resources.
• Behavioral Adaptation: Caching behavior can also reflect an animal’s intelligence and adaptability. Species that cache effectively often demonstrate higher cognitive abilities, including memory and problem-solving skills.

What Types of Carcasses Are Typically Cached?

Different animals cache various carcasses depending on their size and dietary needs. The type of prey cached often reflects the animal’s caloric requirements, hunting strategies, and the risks involved in securing and storing the food.

• Smaller Animals: Some smaller predators, such as certain rodents and birds of prey, cache smaller animals or parts of larger carcasses. This behavior ensures a food reserve during periods of scarcity.
• Larger Prey: Many carnivorous animals, such as wolves and bears, cache larger prey like deer, elk, or livestock. These animals often cannot consume an entire carcass in one sitting, making caching a practical strategy for later consumption.

The Impact of Climate and Environment

Carcass caching is especially prevalent in regions where food availability fluctuates due to seasonal changes. 

• Temperate Zones: In temperate climates, animals may rely heavily on caching to survive harsh winters. During these times, food sources like berries or smaller prey may be scarce, making cached food a lifeline.
• Warmer Climates: In hotter environments, rapid decomposition can lead animals to cache remains quickly. The need to conceal food before it spoils drives caching behavior, ensuring that animals can return to their stores before they perish.
• Seasonal Availability: In some ecosystems, particular seasons may yield an abundance of food (e.g., after a migration of prey animals), prompting caching behaviors to prepare for future scarcity.

Hiding Locations for Cached Carcasses

Animals often choose strategic hiding spots for their cached carcasses to protect their finds from others. Here are a few of those hiding locations.

• Dense Vegetation: Great areas for caching carcasses are areas with thick underbrush or foliage that provide natural cover and mask potential competitors’ scents. These camouflaged areas make locating the cached food difficult for other animals.
• Holes or Burrows: Some animals dig holes or use existing burrows to store carcasses safely. This method not only conceals the food but also protects it from scavengers.
• Natural Features: Utilizing rocks, logs, or other natural formations can be effective hiding spots. These features provide additional camouflage and protection from the elements.
• Water Sources: In certain instances, animals may cache food near water sources, which can be beneficial for retrieval, especially during dry seasons.

Ecological Implications of Carcass Caching

Carcass caching plays a significant and often underappreciated role in the broader dynamics of ecosystems. Beyond providing an individual animal with a reliable food source, this behavior has ripple effects that impact various species and contribute to the overall health and balance of the ecosystem.

• Nutrient Recycling: Cached carcasses can contribute to nutrient cycling in ecosystems. As animals return to their caches, they may inadvertently aid in dispersing seeds or promoting plant growth.
• Predator-Prey Relationships: Caching behaviors can influence predator-prey dynamics. For instance, the presence of cached food may attract other predators or scavengers, altering the balance within the ecosystem.
• Social Structures: Caching behaviors can strengthen social bonds within the pack in species that live in groups, such as wolves. By sharing cached food, animals reinforce social hierarchies and cooperative behaviors.

Why Carcass Caching is Important

Carcass caching is a vital and often overlooked survival strategy employed by many animal species, and caching happens with small mammals, birds, and large carnivores. This behavior involves storing dead prey or scavenged remains in hidden or secure locations, such as burrows, trees, or underground caches. By caching carcasses, animals can maximize the utility of a single kill or find, reduce the frequency of risky hunting or scavenging expeditions, and maintain a reliable food source during times of scarcity, such as harsh winters, solitary summers, droughts, or periods of low prey availability. This resourceful behavior underscores the remarkable adaptability and foresight many species have developed in response to environmental pressures.

These hoarding behaviors are influenced by an animal’s immediate survival needs, evolutionary pressures, and learned experiences. Recent research has also uncovered novel mechanisms for how animals cache and retrieve food, including strategies that do not rely solely on memory, highlighting the nuanced ways animals balance risk, energy expenditure, and long-term survival. Understanding carcass caching provides insight not only into individual animal behavior but also into broader ecological processes.