Microbes give meerkat gangs their signature scents

Their musky odor comes from the action of bacteria

Date: June 12, 2017

Source: Duke University

Body odor. To some it's an embarrassing nuisance. But to meerkats, it's a calling card.

These sociable South African members of the mongoose family produce a pungent "paste" in a pouch beneath their tails that they smear on plants, rocks and even other meerkats to mark their turf. With one whiff they can tell if a scent belongs to a relative, a rival or a potential mate.

But the chemical signals in this stinky graffiti don't come from the meerkats themselves, researchers report. They're made by odor-producing bacteria that thrive in the meerkats' gooey secretions.

Lots of animals, from insects to humans, give off distinctive scents that help them distinguish each other and find and choose mates, said study co-author Christine Drea, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University. "The question is: how did they get it?" Drea said. Are their unique body odors genetically inherited, picked up from the environment, or do they come from somewhere else?

In a study to be published June 12 in the journal Scientific Reports, Drea, lead author Sarah Leclaire and colleagues swabbed the scent pouches of roughly three dozen wild meerkats living among the grassy dunes of the Kuruman River Reserve in South Africa's Kalahari Desert.

Read on 

Meerkat call patterns are linked to sex, social status and reproductive season

May 3, 2017

 

Within a group of meerkats, call patterns vary with factors including sex, rank and reproductive season—but not with stress hormones, according to a study published May 3, 2017 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jelena Mausbach from University of Zurich, Switzerland; Marta Manser from University of Pretoria, South Africa; and colleagues.

Meerkats live in family groups with social hierarchies, emitting contact calls that help maintain group cohesion during foraging. These calls are distinctive and have variable rates across individuals, but the influences on this behavior are unknown. To identify factors linked to call patterns, Mausbach, Manser and colleagues analyzed sound recordings and measured fecal stress hormones of 64 meerkats from 9 groups in the wild.

The researchers found that call patterns vary with factors such as sex, social status, and reproductive season, suggesting that meerkat calls within a family group provide listeners with cues about the producers.

Read more at:

Live Meerkats at London Zoo broadcast using whitespace - via D R Shoop

Watch the meerkats live at ZSL London Zoo from our TV white space camera. 

This feed will be live for two months as part of a joint ZSL, Google and Ofcom trial to test the capabilities of TV white space technology. 

http://youtu.be/KG0nFMgXaio

White spaces is the name given to parts of spectrum that are unused in a particular location and time. White space technology is now being piloted in the UK and the pilot is among the first of its kind in Europe. The pilot will use the white spaces that exist between airwaves primarily used for digital terrestrial TV broadcasting (470 MHz to 790 MHz).

Meerkats 'pay rent' to dominant female to stay in group

Some subordinate female meerkats wet-nurse a dominant female's offspring in exchange for not being evicted from the group, a study suggests.

Researchers found that females were more likely to do this if they had recently lost pups or had returned to the group following eviction.

A group's dominant female aggressively suppresses other females from breeding through infanticide or eviction.

The findings have been published in the Animal Behaviour journal.

"When dominant females are pregnant, in the last few weeks of the pregnancy they usually throw out the top level of subordinate females," explained co-author Kirsty Macleod, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge.

"That can be four or five subordinate females that are really strongly aggressed.

"This is because if a female is pregnant herself, she is more likely to kill the pups of another pregnant female in an attempt to try and secure care for her own pups.

"In the past, we thought that this behaviour was to try and stop the (dominant female's) pups being killed,"

Continued

Meerkats Use Subordinate Animals as Guinea Pigs When Approaching Novel Threats

Feb. 18, 2013 — In their environment, wild animals are exposed to countless threats, be they predators, diseases or natural obstacles to get over, such as gorges or rivers. In the course of evolution, they have developed specific behavioural responses to allow them to deal with these risks. In recent times, numerous human-made threats have been added to the naturally-existing ones, such as dangerous roads to cross. On the evolutionary time scale, it is excluded that the animals have evolved a whole new repertoire of adaptive responses to these risks.

Photo: Wikipedia

Simon Townsend is a behavioural biologist at the University of Zurich, and Nicolas Perony is a systems scientist at ETH Zurich. They teamed up to understand how animals cope with novel human-made threats by studying groups of wild meerkats, a species of socially-living mongooses.

The leader gives way when crossing the road

To this end, Townsend observed several meerkat groups in the Kalahari Desert. Through the reserve runs a rather heavily-frequented road, which effectively cut the animals' home range in half. On their way from one burrow to another, the meerkats are often forced to cross the road. Based on field observations, the researchers discovered that in most cases it was the highest-ranked animal -- the dominant female -- who led her group to the road. However, upon reaching the road she yielded to a lower-ranked individual, who took up the role of "guinea pig" to cross the road first.

(Credit: © Simon Townsend / Kalahari Meerkat Project)

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130218173226.htm

Meerkat survival 'threatened by inbreeding'

The survival chances of meerkats is being threatened by inbreeding, according to a new study.

Researchers spent 20 years studying data from almost 2,000 meerkats living in clans in South Africa's Kalahari Desert.

They found almost half of the animals showed some evidence of inbreeding.

Meerkat pups that are inbred are smaller, lighter and less likely to survive in the wild than their counterparts.

The project was a collaboration between scientists at the universities of Edinburgh, Cambridge and Zurich, as well as the Zoological Society of London.

They recorded births and deaths and the movement of meerkats between colonies in the Kuruman River Reserve.

Continued:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-18227745

Meerkats recognise others' voices

Meerkats recognise another member of their social group by the sound of their voice, according to scientists.

Researchers studying the animals in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, played recordings of meerkat calls and observed the animals' reactions.

Their discovery, reported in the journal Biology Letters is the first evidence of a non-primate mammal showing vocal recognition in the wild.

The phenomenon could be more widespread in the animal kingdom than thought.

"There's lots of evidence of vocal recognition in primates," explained lead researcher Dr Simon Townsend from the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

"[In primates] you can really test whether they respond to individual vocal recognition."

But this harder to test in other non-primates, he explained, because relationships between individual animals are not as clear.

In meerkats, for example - although they are social animals that live in groups and forage and even raise young together - it is not entirely clear how one animal will respond to another when it hears its call.

To solve this problem, the researchers used a simple audio playback experiment.

They used recordings of the staccato "close calls" that meerkats make continually while they are foraging. "We think the calls mainly function to keep the group together," said Dr Townsend. "But they also tell other individuals, 'I'm here, this is my patch'."

The scientists placed speakers on either side of a foraging meerkat, and played a call from a member of their social group. A few seconds later they played the call of a different member of the same group through a speaker on the opposite side.

Read on...

Hormone makes meerkats more cooperative

Dosing meerkats with the hormone oxytocin makes them spend more time and energy helping others in their group, according to a new study.


And it doesn't just affect one or two of meerkats' wide range of cooperative or 'pro-social' behaviours - it boosts a broad spectrum.


This finding may hold the answer to why social animals don't just help out with tasks they will directly benefit from, like digging burrows - they also do things for the good of the group that actually cost them as individuals, like giving food they've caught to other group members' young.

'All the co-operative behaviours seem to be controlled at a high level by the same pathway,' says Dr Joah Madden of the University of Exeter, lead author of the paper, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 'One of the big questions in animal behaviour has been why individuals behave cooperatively. Until now, studies have typically looked at just one behaviour and tried to find explanations for it in isolation, rather than looking at altruistic behaviour as a whole syndrome.'

Madden and co-author Professor Tim Clutton-Brock of the University of Cambridge gave intramuscular injections of either oxytocin or a control saline solution to 36 wild meerkats from four groups living in South Africa's Kuruman River Reserve. They then counted how often they behaved cooperatively over the next half hour.

Animals that had been given oxytocin showed significantly higher levels of cooperative behaviours – like helping dig burrows, guarding the group from predators and caring for young – than when they had received a placebo.


The effects on all the cooperative actions were noticeable. Individuals exposed to oxytocin showed around a 50 per cent increase in the amount of their food they gave to young. And they were about half as likely to behave aggressively.

Digging or guarding benefits all the animals in a group, but giving away food to pups may reduce the individual's own nutritional state, while providing the feeder with limited direct benefits.

On the face of it, it's easier to understand why animals would engage in the first kind of altruistic activity than the second. But this study suggests there's a single mechanism controlling both kinds of altruistic behaviour. Because there is a whole suite of these cooperative activities, all moderated by a pathway involving oxytocin, the meerkats can't selectively engage in one or two of them but ignore others.

'Individuals could be caught in a bind in which they behave in ways that are harmful to them because these behaviours are part of the same system as other behaviours that are beneficial,' Madden suggests. 'Of course you would expect altruistic behaviour to be beneficial, or the animals wouldn't do it,' he adds. If the net result is generally beneficial, individuals might find themselves behaving in ways that harm their own interests.

'Over time you would expect that natural selection will weed out specific behaviours that are costly for the individual and decouple them from those behaviours that provide benefits, but this can take a long time,' Madden adds.

Oxytocin acts as a neurotransmitter in mammals' brains, and is released in largest quantities during childbirth. It's already been shown to cause altruistic behaviour in voles, and studies have even shown that it can increase pro-social traits like trust and reliability in humans.

Madden says it would now be interesting to investigate the effects of oxytocin in a wider range of species, including both social and non-cooperative animals.

The research was funded directly by a grant from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, but built on work supported by earlier funding from the Natural Environment Research Council. A vet was present throughout the experiments to make sure the meerkats weren't harmed.

Tom Marshall

http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/news/story.aspx?id=889

Aga meerkats rule the roost

23 March 2010, 10:36

Two meerkats, who began life inside a glove on top of an Aga oven in Devon, are about to celebrate their first birthday.

Wren and Rascal, along with a third sibling, were rejected by their mother at the Axe Valley Bird and Animal Park in Devon.

Luckily for the tiny creatures, park owners Jayne Collier and her husband Andrew were on hand to take them in.

Mrs Collier was unable to save the third baby meerkat, but Wren and Rascal have made great progress.

The pair, who were just the size of a finger, spent their first weeks of life inside a glove on top of the Colliers' kitchen Aga.

As they grew they were given free-range of the house, which brought out their destructive side.

Following their natural instincts, the duo spent their days digging and burrowing - scraping out the grouting between the kitchen flagstones and fluffing up the carpet.

And despite their shaky start in life the two certainly weren't timid; they would regularly join the humans for walks around the farm, terrifying the dogs with their sharp teeth.

Eventually the the tear-away twosome were given their own new pen, as they wouldn't now be welcomed back by their original family.

So Wren and Racal are kings of their own domain and can even expect the arrival of two new females to keep them company soon.

http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/Aga_meerkats_rule_the_roost

Giraffe meets meerkat

Click to enlarge

http://e-edition.metro.co.uk/010/02/19/ - p33

New attractions at zoo soon

Monday, 30 November 2009
Chamikara Weerasinghe

Arrangements have been made to bring 12 penguins from Japan and two pairs of lion cubs from China and Armenia to be exhibited at the National Zoological Gardens, Dehiwala, Director Duminda Jayalath said.

Jayalath said negotiations are under way with the Zoological Gardens in Japan, China and Armenia.

Some animals would be sent to the new zoo being built at Pinnawala in an area of 53 acres, he said.

"Animals will not be purchased. They will be obtained by way of an animal exchange that takes place between the countries," he said.

Meanwhile, the National Zoological Gardens has come under fire by various groups and individuals for neglecting its duty to animals.

Two lions and meerkats have died at Dehiwala Zoological Gardens this year.

Admitting the incidents, Jayalath said several animals including two lions, two meerkats, one tapir, one baby pygmy hippo and a riverine hippo died at the Zoological Garden, Dehiwala due to old age and 'not' due to negligence.

Referring to the deaths of two lions at the Dehiwala Zoological Gardens, he said these lions have lived at the zoo for 22 years. The average life span of a lion is between 15 to 22 years, he said.

He dismissed that the animals have died due to negligence of the authorities.

http://www.dailynews.lk/2009/11/30/news11.asp

Owner 'gives meerkats toy mother'

Friday, November 27 2009, 14:41 GMT
By Mayer Nissim, Entertainment Reporter

The owner of five baby meerkats whose mother died in childbirth has given the animals a cuddly toy as a replacement.

Steve Rowlands, 28, has used the ten-inch figure and a hot water bottle to help the meerkats at Tropical Inc in Oldbury, West Midlands, The Daily Telegraph reports.

Rowlands said: "The babies are a month old now and they lost their mum just two days after they were born.

"We bought the toy to try and lessen the trauma for them and try and make things as natural as possible. We put it in with them and they just snuggled up to it like it was their mother.

"To recreate the warmth that Anika would have given off we also found a small hot water bottle we got the right temperature."

He added: "They now assume that the toy is their mum and they acting completely normally around it. Of course every hour we have to feed them milk ourselves, but use miniature little bottles which recreate how they would get it from mum.

"We even give it to them near the toy so they can't tell the difference between it and their mother - it's a really good result.

"At around six weeks old we are going to wean them away from their cuddly mum, as they would be in real life. That's when we can hopefully put them back in with their dad."

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/odd/news/a188877/owner-gives-meerkats-toy-mother.html

Compare the Meerkat benefits wildlife park

The Oxford Times, 3 September 2009, p7.

Compare the meerkats in a baby boom

BELFAST ZOO is celebrating a baby zoom after three young meerkats joined its ranks. The new additions joing three adult females and two adult male meerkats and follow the recent birth of a black-tailed prairie dog. The infant meerkats have just started to make their first public appearances and zoo staff said they were delighted by the good news.

Belfast zoo curator of the new babies said: 'The size and cute behaviour of the new babies will no doubt make them popular with our visitors. It is always great to see the arrival of new animals in the zoo.'

Staff said the babies can be best seen in the morning. The zoo added: 'Meerkats are a type of mongoose. Unlike other mongooses which are solitary and nocturna, meerkats live in large groups and come out during the day. They are often seen standing up on their hind legs, propped up by their tails, looking out for birds. Meerkats are found in savannahs and open plains of southern Africa. They can measure up to 35cm and their tails can reach 25cm. They weigh up to 730 grams.'

The animals have been popularised by BBC documentary-style series Meerkay Manor and online sensation Russian aristocrat meerkat Aleksander Orlov. The BBC series, blending actual footage with dramatic narration, tells the story of the Whiskers, a meerkat family living in the Kalahari Desert. Aleksander Orlov was a hit when he appeared in an ad for comparethemarket.com.

Metro.co.uk, Tuesday 11 August 2009, p8.

Compare these meerkats

metro.co.uk, 1 May 2009, p.11

Honest crabs, power to the hungry, nice mice and clever meerkats: News from the American Naturalist

HOW OFTEN DO ANIMALS LIE ABOUT THEIR INTENTIONS?
An article by Princeton Biologist Mark Laidre suggests that when an animal signals an intent to attack, chances are it's not bluffing. Using hermit crabs as subjects, Laidre tested previous mathematical models that predict animals have a significant incentive to give dishonest signals about their intentions. Some models suggest that animals may lie about their intentions up to 40 percent of the time. Laidre used dummy hermit crabs to invade the personal space of live crabs. Contrary to the models, the crabs nearly always backed up their threats with an attack. Those that didn't signal a threat nearly always fled. The findings, Lairde says, suggest that animals don't lie about their actions nearly as much as theorists once predicted.

Mark E. Laidre, "How Often Do Animals Lie About Their Intentions? An Experimental Test," 173:March.

POWER TO THE HUNGRY: HOW THE NEEDIEST CAN LEAD LARGE GROUPS
Flocks of birds, swarms of insects and herds of ungulates don't need to take a vote to choose their leaders. According to research led by Larissa Conradt (University of Sussex), leaders in large animal groups can emerge automatically. Conradt and her colleagues created a theoretical model that simulates the movements of a large group in which members have conflicting plans about where they'd like to go. The simulation showed that individuals who valued their preferred destination over group cohesion often led the group—even if they were in the minority. Those who were less concerned about the destination went along for ride just to stay with the group. "As a consequence," Conradt says, "large groups are often automatically led by those members that are most desperate to reach a particular destination, or are most indifferent as to whether or not the group breaks up." There's some empirical evidence to back up the model. Studies have shown that food deprived fish move to the front of shoals, presumably to steer the group toward food.

L. Conrad, J. Krause, I. D. Couzin, and T. J. Roper, "'Leading According to Need' in Self-Organizing Groups," 173:March

GENTLE GIANTS WOO MORE LADIES (IN MICE, ANYWAY)
Sometimes the nice guy gets the girls. At least that's how it is for striped mice. A research team led by Carsten Schradin (University of Zurich and University of the Witwatersrand) studied the breeding strategies of striped mice in South Africa. They found that dominant males who controlled breeding groups had lower testosterone levels than subdominant males. "What is unusual about this society is that the dominant males are in fact the most sociable, often grooming other group members," Schradin says. "It is the smaller and solitary living males, which roam from one group to another, that have the highest testosterone levels." The roaming males try to coerce females to mate, which, as one might imagine, is less successful than establishing a breeding group.

Carsten Schradin, Michael Scantlebury, Neville Pillay, and Barbara König, "Testosterone levels in dominant sociable males are lower than in solitary roamers: physiological differences between three male reproductive tactics in a sociably flexible mammal," 173:March

MEERKATS AND THE EVOLUTION OF SPECIALIZED ALARM CALLS
Meerkats' cooperative social structure may have led them to evolve a specialized system of alarm calls, according to an article by Roman Furrer and Marta Manser from the University of Zurich. Meerkats have the ability to vary their alarm calls depending on what type of predator threatens them. In other words, they use one call when threatened from the air by an eagle, and a different call when threatened from the ground by a snake. But Cape ground squirrels, that live side-by-side in the same habitat as meerkats, have not evolved this type of alarm call. So why would such calls evolve on one species and not the other when both live in the same area? Furrer and Manser suggest it has to do with social structure. Meerkats are highly social creatures. They coordinate their foraging activities as well as their escape plans. So knowing what predator is approaching helps in coordination. The ground squirrels, on the other hand, act largely independent of each other and may have less need for specified alarm calls.

Roman D. Furrer and Marta B. Manser, "The evolution of urgency-based and functionally referential alarm calls in ground-dwelling species," 173:March.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-02/uocp-hcp021909.php