Meerkat facts

The meerkat, an extremely cute member of the mongoose family, can often be seen standing upright on its hind legs, gazing alertly over the southern African plains. Don’t be fooled by their playful, humorous antics though – meerkats are one of the most murderous species in the animal kingdom, with matriarchal females willing to go to any lengths to maintain their icy grip of control over the clan.¹

• As many as one in five meerkats end up being murdered by their peers.²
• In the wild, meerkats roam territories that extend for several square kilometres.³
• Adult meerkats teach young pups how to hunt difficult prey such as scorpions.⁴
• Meerkats have a matriarchal society, where one dominant female will produce up to 80% of the pups, which are raised collectively by the clan.
• The top female may even kill other meerkats’ offspring to ensure her own young receive the clan’s full attention and resources.
• Female mob leaders are more than 10% heavier than subordinates, have three times as much testosterone, and are more frequently aggressive than subordinates or even dominant males.⁵
• Low-status males often sneak off in the middle of the night to reproduce with females in other groups.⁶
• Although all meerkats act as sentries (keeping a lookout for predators), some meerkats are more trusted than others.⁷
• The fork-tailed drone bird can mimic meerkat alarm calls, tricking them into abandoning food.⁸
• Meerkats possess an extremely sophisticated vocal repertoire, with calls that can specify the exact type of predator and how close they are.⁹
• Meerkats spend a great deal of time grooming one another. They are also known to take care of each other, especially cubs and old, sick members of the mob.¹⁰

Meerkats are small carnivorous mammals from the mongoose family. They have mottled, sandy-grey coloured fur which helps them blend in with their environment in the African savannah, plus pointy inquisitive faces with dark patches around their eyes.

These extremely social animals live together in large communities known as mobs. Each mob may consist of up to 50 individuals, with up to three families living together at one time.¹¹ Meerkats spend a great deal of the day foraging for food, but also make time to play with and groom one another. Meerkats have a matriarchal society, where one dominant female will produce up to 80% of the pups, which are then raised by the entire clan.

Each morning as the sun rises, meerkats emerge from their burrows and begin to look for food. A few individuals serve as sentries or lookouts, watching the skies for hawks and eagles. If a meerkat sees a predator, they will emit a sharp call, causing the other meerkats to dive for cover. While the lookouts keep guard, the other meerkats will usually hunt independently, digging in the sand to catch beetles, caterpillars, spiders, scorpions, small rodents and birds. Meerkats can also sometimes cooperate and work together to capture bigger prey, such as large lizards. They can also graze on fruit and vegetation, and steal birds’ eggs.

Adult meerkats have even been observed teaching young pups how to hunt difficult prey such as scorpions. In one study, researchers saw older, experienced meerkats presenting dead scorpions to young members of the colony.¹² As the pups grew older, the teachers switched to giving the youngsters live scorpions so that they could practise their killing skills.

Meerkats live in the dry, open plains, savannahs, and grasslands of Southern Africa.¹³ They can be found in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana and South Africa, as well as the Namib Desert in Namibia. They also reside in Zimbabwe, Angola and Mozambique.

Meerkats use their sharp claws to dig extensive burrows in the sand and earth which can extend up to five metres (16ft) in length.¹⁴ The networks of tunnels can contain multiple entrances, and many underground rooms. A single family group may use up to five burrows at any one time, helping meerkats to shelter from the hot sun and escape the reach of predators.

Female meerkats can have several litters in one year. Females usually give birth during the rainy season, between November and March. Gestation lasts for around 10 weeks, after which the female gives birth to anywhere between one to eight pups.¹⁵ When born, the pups are tiny, weighing between 25.5g to 36.9g (0.9 to 1.3 ounces). However, they grow quickly, opening their eyes after two weeks, and venturing out of the den by four weeks. After nine weeks they are weaned, and ready to forage for themselves.

While meerkats hunt and forage for insects with their heads buried in the sand, a few other meerkats will act as sentries, standing upright on their hind legs and scanning the horizon looking for any untoward invaders. If they see a predator, a meerkat will emit a shrill alarm call, causing the other members of the group to dive for cover.

However, some meerkats are better at being lookout guards than others. In 2016 and 2017, Ramona Rauber at the University of Zurich observed nine groups of meerkats in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert.¹⁶ While meerkats of all ages and ranks acted as lookouts, Rauber found that some meerkats performed the job more often than others. Those that acted as watchers at least 50% more frequently than others were classed as "super guards". There were also “common guards" and “rare guards". To investigate trust levels, Rauber recorded “all-clear” calls from various sentries and played them back to meerkats who were foraging alone. She observed how often the foragers looked up to check for predators while hearing the calls. Remarkably, meerkats looked up least when listening to recordings of “super-guards” giving the all-clear signal call, suggesting that these animals were more trusted than their peers.

However sometimes other trickster animals can mimic the meerkat alarm call for their own nefarious ends. During a BBC documentary, ‘Africa,’ the camera crew caught a drongo bird trying to win the confidence of a meerkat mob.¹⁷ First the bird sounded a warning call when an eagle was flying overhead. True to form, the grateful meerkats rushed underground to safety. Then the drongo sounded another warning, this time a false alarm. The meerkats fled to their burrows, leaving their newly foraged food unguarded for the drongo to steal. The false alarm bird-call trick only worked once, but subsequently the bird learned to exactly mimic the meerkats’ own alarm call, allowing it to trick the meerkat mob out of its food again.

Meerkats follow a strict social hierarchy, with one dominant pair in the group almost completely monopolising mating and reproduction.¹⁸ The other lower-status animals then help to raise the dominant pair’s young, seemingly sacrificing their own chances of reproductive success. Dominant females will even kill other meerkats' offspring to ensure their own young receive the maximum attention and help of the other colony members. They will also evict other females that they see as a threat from the group.

However, there is evidence that subordinate males, at least, can find ways to reproduce. One study shows that, while low-status males rarely get to mate with females within their own colony, they often sneak off in the middle of the night to reproduce with both dominant and subordinate females in other groups.¹⁹ Over a five-year period, researchers tracked 15 groups of meerkats on ranch land in the southern Kalahari Desert. They often observed subordinate males leaving their group and making trips to other territories, but didn’t know why. After they conducted DNA tests to establish the paternity of the pups born during that time, they discovered that a quarter of all baby meerkats born were sired by males outside of their group. In other words, it was clear that low-status males were using their nightly trips to mate with females.

Meerkats are extremely social animals, spending a good deal of their day playing together and grooming one another.²⁰ Meerkats use grooming to bond with other members of their group, care for offspring, and placate dominant individuals.²¹ They even take care of each other, especially cubs and old or sick members of the mob.²²

However, meerkat society has a dark side too. When the matriarch dies, and a vacancy for the top spot becomes available, there is intense competition and fighting.²³ The biggest female meerkat will usually fill the top spot, and from the moment she steps in, the new female’s testosterone levels rise, and her aggression towards other females increases.²⁴ Any females close to her size will be evicted from the clan, as will any pregnant females. 

Research has shown that female meerkats that become dominant are more than 10% heavier than subordinates, have three times as much testosterone, and are more frequently aggressive than subordinates or even dominant males.²⁵ In fact, when a top spot becomes available, it appears that meerkats gain weight to try to fill it. In one 2016 study, researchers conducted an experiment on 14 groups of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert.²⁶ They took 48 pairs of same-sex siblings, and fed the lighter sibling extra helpings of boiled eggs to beef them up. They found that over a three-month period, the other siblings ate more and increased their own growth rate to stay heavier and compete. However, the stress caused by intense competition can have serious long-term consequences on meerkats’ health. One study found that dominant females that had previously been evicted from the group when they were a subordinate had lower breeding success and produced fewer pups.²⁷

Over a series of experiments, Marta Manser, a professor of animal behaviour at the University of Zurich, set about investigating how meerkats communicate with one another. Over a period of months, she presented a mob of meerkats with props of various predators, including jackals, eagles, and wild cats to see how they would react. She then recorded the calls they made as her team moved the props closer to the sentry meerkats. The results of her studies revealed that meerkats possess an extremely sophisticated repertoire of calls. For instance, meerkats on guard produce at least six different types of soft calls during the entire length of the guarding session.²⁸ These soft, high-pitched calls are emitted every few seconds by the sentry to reassure  busy foragers that they are safe from danger. Meerkats also have distinct calls for different types of predators, such as eagles or jackals, and can vary their calls to convey the urgency of the threat – for example how near or far the predator is.²⁹ One vocalisation might be used to convey the message “a bird of prey is approaching fast,” while another is used to say “a jackal has been spotted in the distance.” An urgent bark translates to “get under cover now.”  Manser also discovered that playing recordings of different calls to meerkats reliably triggered specific and predictable responses. 

Despite their cute and cuddly appearance, meerkats don’t make good pets for several reasons. Firstly, they are extremely social animals used to living in groups of up to 50 individuals. They need the company of other meerkats to live a happy, fulfilled life, and will feel stressed in small enclosures or small group sizes. Despite this, the RSPCA often sees individual meerkats being kept in people’s homes or offered for sale as solitary animals by pet shops.³⁰ Once they are separated from their colony, meerkats are difficult to integrate back into social groups, and so solitary meerkats face living the rest of their lives alone.

Meerkats also need plenty of space to thrive, as in the wild they roam territories that extend for several kilometres. They need big, enriched enclosures that aren’t possible to achieve in a domestic environment. According to the RSPCA ,if they don’t receive this or are deprived the social contact they need, then they are prone to aggression, destructive behaviour, self-harm and metabolic bone disease.³¹

Meerkats also have traits that don’t make them ideal family pets. They are diggers, and spend hours in the wild making burrows or digging for food. Carpets, floors and skirting boards will certainly fall foul of this behaviour. Meerkats also use scent-to communicate with other meerkats. In the home, this translates to brown smelly marks on the furniture.

If you were asked to picture the world’s most murderous mammal, your answer probably wouldn’t be the meerkat. However, a 2016 study which analysed violent behaviour in more than 1,000 mammal species found that this cute, furry and inquisitive mammal is the most likely to be slaughtered by its own kind.³² It found that as many as one in five meerkats, mostly youngsters, end up being murdered by their peers.

Meerkat clans consist of up to 50 individuals, with around three families living together. The mob is led by a female matriarch, who monopolises breeding, and takes ruthless measures to prevent other meerkats from reproducing.³³ If any other female falls pregnant, than the matriarch will likely kill the pups, and banish the mother from the clan – a possible death sentence in the Kalahari Desert. The matriarch will do this even if the culprit is her daughter, and the pups her grandchildren.

Meerkats are not generally considered dangerous to humans, although they can deliver a nasty bite to a stranger or intruder, even latching on to the bone.³⁴ Meerkats can also carry a strain of rabies that can be transferred to humans.³⁵

Featured image © Gunter Nuyts | Shutterstock

Fun fact image © Clément ROY | Unsplash

Quick Facts:

1. Source: https://www.naturalhistoryonthenet.com/Mammals/meerkat.htm

Fact File:

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