17 December 2024. Old news from 2012 with a recent update.
Food is scarce in the arctic during winter and early spring, so arctic ground squirrels (Urocitellus parryii) fatten up for hibernation and cache food for later use.
When they wake up in April they have seeds in their cache to fall back on before the arctic blooms.
32,000 years ago, during the Ice Age, a ground squirrel stored food in his midden that he never ate. If everything had remained frozen no one would have known about his cache, but climate change is melting glaciers and ancient ice. Eventually the squirrel’s cache was exposed.
Twelve years ago Russian scientists collected the squirrel’s cache and found intact seeds within so they cultivated them in the lab. The fertile seeds grew into a 32,000 year old plant, the oldest on Earth.
After they published their findings they continued their research and cultivated more seeds, identifying them as Silene linnaeana in 2021. This is the same genus as bladder campion.
from Late Pleistocene fruit material at researchgate.net
Here’s a sample blooming in the Sahka Republic of Russia in June 2023 (from iNaturalist).
What will happen to this squirrel’s cache 32,000 years from now?
