Question: how does a squirrel know to eat nuts and not something else?

Pizza Ka Yee Chow answered on 14 Nov 2018:

Squirrels know to eat nuts is a relatively instinctive behaviour. There are some components inside nuts or acorns that squirrels could smell them. Squirrels show a preference to these smell and they will also assess the quality of acorns. Indeed, other than nuts and acorns, squirrels eat more than 198 types of food including flowers, insects, seeds, fruit and veg, and of course artificial food (even though these are less food for them) to name a few. So they don’t eat nuts, but rather a variety of food types.