Animal Behavior with Meerkats

A suricate from the "Whiskers" group on sentinel

Photos on this page were taken by Mary Beth Kircher during an Earthwatch Expedition to the Meerkat Project on Kuruman River Reserve in South Africa in the summer of 2006 (unless otherwise noted).

Journal of the trip

We will use the meerkats to enliven our discussion of animal behavior. The homework that you will have completed prior to this assignment includes reading and notetaking from your text.

Habituation of the Meerkat groups

In order to study the meerkats (Suricata suricatta), the groups had to be habituated to humans moving in their midst and having limited interaction with humans. The process is slow, taking about a year for full habituation, and care must be taken so the groups do not become too tame. The meerkat groups on the Kuruman reserve are habituated to a sound that any human working with the meerkats must make as they move amongst them. It is a Hm hm hmmm sound and it must be used whenever approaching the group or while remaining with a group.

As part of the data collection process, the meerkats are weighed three times in a day - when rising from the burrow in the morning, around noon and during the time after foraging and prior to going underground for the night. They have been habituated to climb into the "weights" box with a lure of hardboiled egg and water bottle. Some of them come quite willingly (too willingly and they are refered to as egg mongers) while others need more encouragement.

meerkats and the weights box (short video clip)

A dominant member of the group may decide that the weights box belongs to them and will rub their anal gland along the sides to mark it. This tends to discourage other members of the group from climbing in.

In order to tell the members of the group apart when weighing them or documenting behavior it is important to know that you have the correct meerkat. Though there are natural variations in color and markings, they are not always easy to differentiate thus a method of marking them has been devised.

Brown hair dye is used to mark each meerkat. The one on the far left is right shoulder, tailbase; the one on the far right is left hip, tailbase. Each member of the group has a different dye mark or set of marks. They are also given names, which many of the researchers use, but the markings are what are followed for accurate data collection.

When watching Meerkat Manor, you will occasionally notice the markings but the camera will not be focused on them as you would be in the field thus you will be able to note a behavior but may not be able to indicate which individual is exhibiting the behavior. In the field, this information is crucial.

You will watch a segment of Meerkat Manor from Animal Planet and will record the behaviors you observe on the handout for this purpose. (Any of the episodes could be used, but some have different behaviors shown. I am using an episode from the first season called A Family Affair)

Suricates will "go on sentinel" on the highest surface in the immediate area. Here, I happened to be the highest thing.

After viewing the Meerkat Manor Segment -
discuss the check off sheet. What did students
notice?

Students in my classes will then relate what
they observed with their text notes AND
with their summer reading assignments.

Review sheet to connect terms from the text reading with the meerkat research.

For more detailed information on the research being conducted, check out these websites:

Click on the briefing in and scroll through for information about the different research projects.http://www.earthwatch.org/site/pp2.asp?c=dsJSK6PFJnH&b=1147455

http://www.zoo.cam.ac.uk/zoostaff/larg/pages/Meerkats.html

http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0209/feature3/

More on the series: Meerkat Manor -
http://animal.discovery.com/fansites/meerkat/meerkat.html

More about the Earthwatch program-
http://www.earthwatch.org/site/pp.asp?c=dsJSK6PFJnH&b=386443