These Endangered Raccoons Started Making Their Own Toys and Scientists Think They Learned From Each Other

Two young raccoons turned discarded paper into balls.

At a beach club on Mexico’s Cozumel Island, a young pygmy raccoon climbed into a trash bin and ignored the food scraps. She pulled out paper, carried it to a water bowl, soaked it, then pressed and rolled it through the sand until the soggy paper tightened into a ball.

Then she played with it.

The raccoon batted the ball across the ground and chased it. Her sister watched. Soon, the second juvenile began trying to make a ball of her own.

“In my mind, it wasn’t some big major discovery,” Nessie O’Neil, a Miami University biologist who recorded the behavior, told Scientific American. “It was, ‘Look how cute! She’s making a ball!’”

But the episode may mean more than just play. In a new study, O’Neil and her colleagues describe what could represent the first documented case in raccoons of deliberately transforming material and then using it for a purpose unrelated to food. More intriguingly, the juveniles seem to have transferred the technique between each other.

The researchers stress the “may, ” which is doing a lot of work. This was an unexpected natural observation, not a controlled experiment, and two siblings sharing tips on how to make paper toys cannot establish a cultural tradition.

Still, over 64 hours, the team documented 14 ball-making sequences. Eight produced completed balls.

Watching, Failing and Trying Again

One juvenile, called Juvenile 1, first performed the full routine. Juvenile 2 watched closely, retrieved paper from the same bin and tried it herself. She initially failed. In one encounter, Juvenile 1 took the material from her sister and finished the wetting and rolling process while Juvenile 2 handled an already completed ball.

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Juvenile 2’s first four attempts failed or remained incomplete. Then, roughly five days after researchers removed Juvenile 1 for rehabilitative care, her sister succeeded alone. She took a hamburger wrapper, brought it into contact with water, rolled it against sand and a rock, and made a ball. Later that day, she made another from a receipt.

That doesn’t necessarily mean one raccoon “taught” the other. Teaching usually implies that an animal actively changes its behavior to help another learn, which isn’t what researchers saw. They instead argue that Juvenile 2 probably learned through observation and copying.

“It became a social activity rather than just a tactile experience for one individual,” study co-author Michelle Szydlowski also told Scientific American.

The animals treated the balls like toys rather than snacks. Researchers recorded six play episodes. The raccoons batted and chased the balls, their mother sometimes joined, and two juvenile dwarf coatis joined once. The raccoons did not eat the paper or food residue on it.

Raccoons already have a reputation for high dexterity and bandit smarts. A 2024 study of wild common raccoons found that they could discover several solutions to food-filled puzzle boxes. Researchers presented wild raccoons with boxes containing 24 locked compartments baited with treats. In one version, every door opened with the same sliding latch; in a harder version, the animals had to contend with four different mechanisms, including bolts, a removable rod, and a rotating latch. Successful raccoons learned multiple ways of getting inside, and some became faster and more efficient with experience.

But most raccoon cognition research has focused on solving problems to obtain food. The Cozumel raccoons are particularly interesting because they altered an object on their initiative and then apparently used it simply to play.

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The Dawn of a Tradition?

The researchers also watched raccoons on a comparable beach club about 30 kilometers away. Juveniles there had paper, water, and extensive exposure to people. Researchers saw object play, but no paper-ball making. The sites sit far enough apart, relative to pygmy raccoon home ranges, that direct transmission between the groups appears unlikely.

Animal behavior researchers use “culture” cautiously. A behavior generally must spread through social learning and persist as a tradition.

Long-tailed macaques, for instance, socially transmit forms of stone handling used in play, and researchers have suggested that this object play may help animals acquire tool-use skills. Orcas pass learned behaviors between generations and maintain distinctive traditions within different groups. Research on elephants has shown that socially transmitted knowledge and relationships can help populations reorganize even after poaching removes older individuals.

For the Cozumel raccoons, researchers may have caught only the beginning. They do not know whether other animals will copy the behavior, whether it will persist or whether Juvenile 2 might have invented it independently.

Those questions carry unusual weight for a species with fewer than 200 mature individuals. Juvenile 1 later died, unfortunately, in rehabilitative care, likely from malnutrition and exposure to human-derived toxic substances. The paper says two other siblings had also died in preceding weeks.

“The observations show how complex animal play behavior can be,” Marek Špinka of the Institute of Animal Science in the Czech Republic told New Scientist. “It will be intriguing to see whether the behavior will get a hold in the population as a new cultural trait or will disappear.”

For an animal this rare, losing even a few individuals could also mean losing unusual learned behaviors before researchers have had a chance to understand how widespread they are.

The study was published in the journal Wild.