It started when the pygmy raccoon dove into the wrong trash bin—not the bin known by her family for its tasty food scraps but the one with paper and plastic waste.
Last January Nessie O’Neil, a graduate student in biology at Miami University in Ohio, watched as a young pygmy raccoon plucked a receipt from the paper trash. The raccoon used her paws to repeatedly dunk the receipt into a bowl of water (a common exploratory behavior). After working the receipt into a ball and rolling it around in the sand, she began batting it across the ground, seeming to play with it.
At the time, O’Neil was observing families of these critically endangered raccoons, who live alongside tourists at a popular beach club and are only found on Mexico’s Cozumel Island. She was hoping to learn more about how human activity affects these animals’ health.
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“In my mind, it wasn’t some big major discovery,” says O’Neil, who specializes in raccoon biology. “It was, ‘Look how cute! She’s making a ball!’”
But when she shared the “cute” video with her research advisor, O’Neil learned it likely was major. Her research, recently published in the journal Wild, may be the first documented evidence of any animal within the Procyonidaefamily—a group that includes raccoons, coatis and ringtails—displaying a form of “material culture”: behavior involving material surroundings that is passed along to others.
Biologist Nessie O’Neil discusses the pygmy raccoon finding.
Such behavior has previously been seen in animals including chimpanzees, pigs, and dolphins, who have been observed teaching family members how to get food with different types of tools.
Study co-author Michelle Szydlowski, an anthrozoologist also at Miami University, was particularly fascinated to see the behavior transfer: The racoon’s family joined in after watching her create her own “toy.” Together, her mother and sister batted the ball and tried to make their own, with varying levels of success. “It became a social activity rather than just a tactile experience for one individual,” Szydlowski says.
Soon after, the pioneering pygmy raccoon died, likely from a combination of malnutrition and toxic exposure to human trash, according to the study. Even after she was gone, her sibling was observed making another ball from paper waste.
“We tend to assume that if we haven’t seen an animal do something, the animal’s not capable of doing that,” says psychologist Michael Kisley, whose research at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs focuses on human beliefs and behavior surrounding animals. Yet Kisley was not surprised by this observation despite its novelty; although raccoons are thought of as pests, they are “intelligent, special beings that deserve a little more protection than just being tossed tortilla chips” by tourists.
Kisley, who was not involved in the study, suggests that as we learn about these animals’ complex psychological processes, we’ll take their conservation more seriously. “It’s this type of careful, well-described observation that can open up new areas of study,” he says.
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