It’s hard to watch the video of this Pika and not see its work ethic shining through. Much like the ant in The Ant And The Grasshopper fable, the tireless action of scurrying out of the rocks to get to vegetation and back again to create a store to last the winter is nothing if not motivating.
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| Pika dwarfed next to hay pile - Photo from Chris Ray, Colorado University, 2010 |
The Pika make many large piles of vegetation, called haypiles, that are used for storage. The Pika are dwarfed by these piles, which are organized based on the time when they will be ready to eat. As the food gets older the nutritional content goes down because of decomposition. The decomposition can be from bacteria, fungi or even insects finding and eating the store. The Pika specifically selects plants with secondary metabolites that are poisonous in order to address this. These metabolites also act as a preservative, becoming less-poisonous as time passes and when the levels are low enough the Pika can eat it. The Pika selects a variety of plants with different concentrations of the poisonous metabolites to ‘time’ when the food will become edible (Video Attenbough).
Pikas preferentially forage in the talus area where they live but have been seen foraging in the surrounding meadows when the in-talus vegetation was low. (Roach 2001)
It's also been observed that if the Pika properly stores food, it loses less weight during the winter months and that the phenolic poisonous metabolites decrease in concentration over the winter months . These phenolic compounds only protect the plant that originally produced them. Haypiles with mixed low and concentration saw no protection from subtilis bacteria when mixed with high phenolic compound containing plants.(Beever 1997)
Awesome idea to add a video. It's a good way to give the readers a chance to get some background information without adding too much dense information. The Haypiles are certainly interesting and definately distinguish the Pika from other mammals.
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