Photo by Andrew Gainer.
Wolverines are loners, and they don’t like to share. They try not to hang out anywhere near other wolverines or other mammals, a social preference that some of us can relate to. And like other grumpy, anti-social creatures, wolverines do not like to share their food.
You’d think that they’d be safe by living in the coldest reaches of the planet, in the middle of snowy wastelands. But they cannot escape the pesky insects and microbes that find a way to live anywhere and that would be happy to feast on the food that wolverines have scared up. To defeat them, the wolverines keep their food in what’s basically a DIY refrigerator. National Geographic News reports:
Robert Inman of the Wildlife Conservation Society and colleagues assert that wolverines use cold, snow-covered structured chambers like crevices and those created by the rugged terrain of mountainous areas to cache food and protect it from other scavengers, insects and bacteria.
Unlike our lame refrigerators, wolverine refrigerators probably actually do reach sub-zero temperatures. Plus, since these fridges exist naturally, they’re energy efficient. And since their fridges have to defeat bacteria, wolverines probably don’t end up throwing away mountains of uneaten food, like we do. Not only aren’t humans the only creatures that have figured out how to preserve food, we’re not even the best at it.
