But such seasonal hoarding is not nearly as cognitively challenging as the daily need to change your plans based on how hungry you will be tomorrow. Further, it isn’t even clear that mice hoard food because they understand that they will be hungry in the future. Indeed, lab mice—although they have never suffered from a cold winter without food—automatically start hoarding food if you simply lower the temperature of their environment, an effect seen only in northern species of mice who have had to evolve to survive winters.
