When choosing between a piece of cake now versus a slimmer waistline in the future, many of us have difficulty with self-control. Food-caching species, however, regularly hide food for later recovery, sometimes waiting months before retrieving their caches. It remains unclear whether these long-term choices generalize outside of the caching domain. We hypothesized that the ability to save for the future is a general tendency that cuts across different situations. To test this hypothesis, we measured and experimentally manipulated caching to evaluate its relationship with operant measures of selfcontrol in pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus). We found no correlation between caching and self-control at the individual level, and experimentally increasing caching did not influence self-control. The self-control required for caching food, therefore, does not carry over to other foraging tasks, suggesting that it is domain specific in pinyon jays.

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