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,"
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