If you own a pet gerbil, you know that it loves eating. Most of the time, gerbils will eat anything they find, or you offer to them. They will often eat to their fill and then hide the remaining food.

Burying food ensures they will have something to eat when there is none. Burying the food also keeps it fresher for longer. Gerbils also bury food to keep it safe from predators. Even captive gerbils will bury food, even when fed daily.

Burying food is an instinctive reaction embedded in a gerbil’s DNA. This article will discuss why gerbils bury their food and how you can stop this behavior.

Why Do Gerbils Bury Their Food?

Yes, gerbils bury their food. It can be weird to see your pet gerbil burying its food even though there is no chance of starvation. It is normal behavior displayed by all rodents, which includes gerbils. A gerbil burying its food is also called hoarding.

Hoarding is a gerbil’s way of ensuring that it has food to eat even in the future. As we said earlier, gerbils instinctively bury their food to hide or store it. In the wild, there is not usually that much food to eat. So, when gerbils find food, they make sure they keep some of the food for months when there is less food.

The key driver of hoarding food is survival. Over the years, gerbils who buried food in preparation for the cold season survived better than those who did not. So, as gerbils evolved, hoarding became a part of their lifestyle.

When Do Gerbils Bury Their Food?

Gerbils mostly hide or bury their food during the spring when there is a lot of food around. During the winter, there is little to no food because plants cannot grow in the cold, and insects tend to hibernate. So, finding food in the winter is usually very hard.

So, a gerbil with hidden food can wait out the cold season without worry. The gerbil only needs to eat little portions of the hidden food, which can last for the entire season. So, the hoarded food provides a cushion for gerbils during cold seasons.

Hoarding can be divided into two main groups, scattered and cache hoarding. Scattered hoarding is when the gerbil hides food in distinct and different areas. In comparison, cache hoarding is when the gerbil buries its food stock in one place.

Reasons for Gerbils Bury Their Food?

The burying of food by gerbils is evolutionary; gerbils have practiced this technique over the centuries. Hoarding of food has ensured that gerbils survive tough times, so gerbils have made it part of their life.

Gerbils usually live in very tough environments such as deserts. According to studies, when a gerbil finds a lot of food, it buries part of it for when there isn’t any. This ensures their survival and reduces competition from other rodents who consume the same type of food.

Let’s dive deeper into why gerbils bury food.

● If the food is rich in nutrients

A gerbil will prefer to bury nutritious food rather than eat it. Gerbils come from arid areas where healthy foods are not easy to come by. So when you feed your gerbil, let’s say nuts, it will deem it fit to store the nuts for a later date when there is less food.

Gerbils know how to tell apart which foods have more nutrients. So they will prefer to eat foods with fewer nutrients today and store the food with more nutrients for later. Why? Because food with more nutrients can last the gerbil’s longer when food is scarce.

● As a way to keep the food fresh

When gerbils come by a nutritious source of food, they try to make the food last longer by burying it. When the food is buried, its nutrients last longer than if it were above ground.

Burying the food also protects it from elements such as rain and sun, which can quickly make the food go bad.

● For survival during winter

When it is cold, nothing grows, and every other animal, including insects, is in hibernation. However, gerbils still stay active, so they bury food to store it for this period. Because gerbils keep the most nutritious food, they can survive the cold season while still getting the necessary nutrients.

In addition, gerbils cannot survive foraging for food in the cold. They would die of frostbite. So, since they already have food, they can eat in the safety of their burrows as they ride the cold season out.

● If you put their food in one area

When feeding your gerbil, you might be putting its food in one area, such as its food bowl. So, because the gerbil is genetically inclined to hoard the excess food, it will remove some of the food and hide it under its bedding.

The gerbil can also cover the food bowl with bedding in an attempt to bury the food in there. In the gerbil’s mind, it is saving for a day when food will be less.

● For security

In the wild, gerbils bury the food so that their competition does not finish everything before them. This behavior can be carried into captivity too. The gerbil will move some of its food and bury it deep inside its bedding so that no other person or creature can get access to it.

Also, the gerbil can decide to cover the whole bowl in bedding so that the food is not visible. You might want to try and stop this behavior, but it is just a gerbil’s way of protecting its bounty.

How Do You Stop Gerbils From Burying Their Food

Unfortunately, it is not possible to stop gerbils from burying food. It is in their DNA, so you can not stop this behavior. Gerbils know they will not starve during the winter if they store food. So they will continue burying the food each time you give them more than they can finish.

So what you can do is at least manage the situation. Offer the gerbil only food it can finish. You would instead feed it small portions of food at different times of the day.

Start by measuring the amount of food the gerbil eats daily and then continue with that proportion. Also, do not feed it any food that spoils quickly. The food can decay and lead to serious health problems for the gerbil.

If you must feed the fresh gerbil food, ensure you check whether the gerbil buries the food. The cage’s bedding contains bacteria, which leads to rapid food decay when the gerbil buries it under it. So ensure you clean out the gerbil’s bedding often to avoid the food decaying.

You could also try scattering the food over the gerbil’s cage. This helps the gerbil feel like it is foraging for its food. So it will not see the need to hoard any food for future use. It will eat what it can find.

Now That We’re Here

So, why do gerbils bury their food? Gerbils bury their food to prepare for when food is less, for example, during cold seasons. Even in captivity, gerbils will still try to hide food for future use.

You cannot stop the gerbil from burying its food. The only thing you can do is manage the situation. You can feed the gerbil food in smaller quantities and avoid putting food in one location, such as a food bowl.

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