Food hoarding, anxiety, and stress in a mammalian hibernator

Diverse vertebrate species utilize hibernation as an energy-management strategy to survive long-term resource scarcity. Many hibernating and non-hibernating species employ food hoarding as a behavioral mechanism for storing surplus energy. Although the 13-lined ground squirrel (Ictidomys tridecemlineatus, 13LGS) relies mainly on body fat as fuel during hibernation, they also hoard food under natural and captive conditions. We tested the hypothesis that 13LGS individual variation in facultative hoarding behavior is driven by internal physiology, including body mass, sex, anxiety, and baseline stress. We recorded food hoard composition and body weight biweekly in summer active squirrels, subjected them to the open-field test (OFT) to measure state anxiety, and quantified fecal corticosterone (CORT) levels to measure baseline stress. We found that hoard sizes increased significantly across the summer, peaking at the end of June when body weight was still linearly increasing. Individual variation accounted for 10-20% of total variation in hoarding patterns. We observed a significant effect of sex on hoard size and composition, with males hoarding more than females. Contrary to our predictions, there was no relationship between hoarding and anxiety-like behavior in the OFT, and non-hoarders had significantly higher fecal CORT than hoarders. Together, our results suggest that time, sex, and baseline stress are significant factors that affect hoarding behavior, but body weight and anxiety-like behaviors are not. In the context of organismal systems biology, food hoarding is a redundant mechanism to fat storage that increases an organism's resilience against future resource scarcity and is likely regulated by dynamic interactions between multiple brain-body networks.