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Photo: Ashleigh Thompson
(Creative Commons posted to Flickr.com by Snowmanradio)
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Meerkats
make some of the most appealing animal pictures. They cluster together to give
wonderful group photos. They clearly form well knit groups with shared division
of labor on such things as watching out for trouble while the rest go looking
for food.
In
their wild breeding colonies they have a clear hierarchy and like any
successful group of animals, the colony doesn’t stay static. Some of the feisty
young males disperse looking for excitement elsewhere. They have to do this
because of the usual group dynamic of the older dominant males hogging the
females.
These
young guys can be innovative in many ways. Thornton and Samson have written up
their study of meerkat innovation and this was featured in a BBC report (1)
after appearing in J Animal Behaviour (2). The authors of the study took the
meerkats favorite food (that is scorpions) and placed them in a container which
was a puzzle to get into.
Young
juvenile meerkats all rushed to try their luck but failed. The old guys were
too busy with affairs of status, leaving the feisty young blades to solve the
problem. Given multiple opportunities to puzzle out how to get a scorpion
dinner, they managed to succeed many times.
However,
their success didn’t come from learning about the complicated set up of the
experimenters, but from dogged persistence. Maybe they had more time on their
paws or maybe they were not quite ready to relax and enjoy the good life as
they weren’t seeing too much of it thus far. Whatever, they appear to be the future
of the meerkat groups as problem solvers for the next meerkat challenge.
