Image cour.tesy of Nessie O'Neil
Joel Kontinen
Young pygmy
raccoons on a Mexican island have been seen teaching each other to make toy
balls out of rubbish, in a rare example of animals crafting objects purely to
play with.
“My first
reaction was, oh my gosh, that’s absolutely adorable!” says Nessie O’Neil at Miami University in Ohio, who is
researching the impact of tourism on the critically endangered pygmy raccoons (Procyon
pygmaeus) of Cozumel Island.
O’Neil
filmed as one of the younger raccoons fished paper out of a rubbish bin, dipped
it in a bowl of water and rolled it in sand, making a ball.
Over days
of observation, she recorded the animals as they made more balls and used them
to play “football” with other raccoons and dwarf coatis (Nasua narica nelsoni),
another raccoon-like animal. Siblings taught each other the ball-making
procedure, and even tried to get their mother involved, though she couldn’t
quite figure it out – her coordination seemed to have been impaired after
drinking a margarita she found at a beach bar earlier that day.
“The
observations show how complex animal play behaviour can be,” says Marek Špinka at the Institute of Animal
Science in the Czech Republic. “It will be intriguing to see whether the
behaviour will get a hold in the population as a new cultural trait or will
disappear.”
Some animals like to show off their intelligence, like the tiny racoons in México. They did not want to eat them but to play with them.
Source:
Matt von Hippel 2026
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