On this Mexican island, raccoons make and play with toys (and also sip margaritas)
As tourists drank margaritas and lounged at a nearby beach club on a warm January day in Cozumel, Mexico, a scientist observed a young female raccoon partaking in her own kind of leisure. The researcher watched as the raccoon pulled from a trash can a long paper receipt, sculpted it into a ball and began batting it between her paws like a football. But then, researchers say, the animal did something even more surprising — she taught her family how to make the balls and play with them, too. According to researchers at Miami University, the discovery is the first-ever documented evidence of raccoons making and playing with toys. The research, published last month in the journal Wild, reveals a hitherto unknown cultural practice and how it is learned by the animals. Scientists define culture as information or behaviors transmitted through learning rather than heredity. While tool making, and even toy making, has been observed in other species, the Wild study represents the first time that raccoons have been recorded engaging in material culture — using, and learning from others how to use, objects. “I’ve looked at hundreds of hours of raccoons,” said Louis Lazure, a biologist and raccoon expert at Concordia University who was not involved in the research, “but I’ve never seen anything like this.” The study centers on pygmy raccoons, a critically endangered species of which there are fewer than 200 individuals left in the wild and which live exclusively on the resort island of Cozumel. The pygmies are smaller and lighter in color than their mainland counterparts, adaptations that help them thrive in the hot, humid summers of southeast Mexico. The animals, which live in the mangrove forests and coastal ecosystems of the island, traditionally subsisted on a diet of crabs and snails. Nowadays, they increasingly eat the trash discarded by tourists, putting them in ever closer proximity to garbage cans. “There is a lot of malnutrition going on in these raccoons due to a diet that is very, very high in tortilla chips,” said Nessie O’Neil, a raccoon biologist and lead author of the study. The raccoons regularly beg tourists for the chips or fish them from trash cans. But while observing the raccoons in January, O’Neil noticed one raccoon looking for something else. “I saw one of the juveniles run to the trash cans and instead of going to the normal organics trash cans where their mama taught them to dig for tortilla chips, she went into the synthetics,” O’Neil said. That’s when she grabbed the receipt and began to shape it into a ball, dunking it in water, rolling it on the sand and crafting it into a toy with which to play. “Then she put it on the ground and was just batting it back and forth,” O’Neil said. “Obviously,” she added, “it was adorable.” Over a period of 64 hours spread out in eight-hour increments, O’Neil witnessed a total of 14 ball-making attempts. The first raccoon’s sister also tried making the balls but initially took the wrong types of material from the trash. “If you do it with a paper towel or a napkin, it will fall right apart,” O’Neil said. Once the sister had the correct material — a hardier piece of paper — she still failed. That led the first raccoon to snatch one of the failed attempts and fold it properly for her. After watching, the sister raccoon was successfully able create her own toys. Later, she and her sister used one of the crafted balls to play with a group of juvenile coatis, a related mammal also endemic to Cozumel. “We’re looking at some sort of social interaction or social learning that’s really fascinating and novel,” said Michelle Szydlowski, a biologist at Miami University and a co-author of the study. The females’ mother also tried making balls but failed, the researchers said, seemingly because she was drunk. After slurping the remnants of an abandoned margarita, the mother raccoon staggered off and tried making a ball. But upon failing, the elder raccoon resigned herself to languishing in the warm sand. That was “the really exciting part,” Szydlowski said. “Because raccoons are so tactile, manipulating objects wasn’t that big of a shock, but the other one trying to copy the first one, and then the first one taking and sort of redoing it, and then the mother trying it, that’s where it gets really exciting.” Making toys is not unheard of in the animal kingdom. In 2010, researchers reported that wild female chimps in Uganda made and played with stick “dolls.” Dolphins have also been observed making toys out of shells, starfish and even live puffer fish. The dolphins provoke the puffer fish into inflating into spiky balls before passing them back and forth. The newly documented behavior in raccoons resembles other mammals whose juveniles like to play while the adults stand by relatively uninterested, Lazure said. Even so, the behavior here is much more complex, underscoring the cognitive capacity of raccoons, he said. Szydlowski thinks the discovery highlights the distinct cultural traits that can form in the animals, which might help to rally support for their protection. “Any time that we can prove that there’s a society here, there’s a culture here, we stand a better chance, hopefully, of finding protection for them,” she said.