Transcript
Commentary
The Kalahari Meerkat Project is one of the longest running field studies on social mammals in the world and has produced a rich insight into many aspects of meerkat culture. One of the researchers involved in this Cambridge University run study is Alex Thornton.
Alex Thornton
Meerkats are a fantastically useful study species. In fact, if you were going to design the perfect mammalian study species, you probably couldn’t get much better than meerkats. They live in very open areas, so they’re easy to see. They’re active during the day, unlike the majority of mammals. They’re extremely social and cooperative, so there’s a lot of interest in trying to understand their social interactions, and why it is that animals will go out of their way to help one another and also they can become very easily habituated to human observers. The aim of habituation is to get the animals to a stage where they’re not scared of people. And there are a number of large animals wandering around the Kalahari Desert, there’s lots of different species of antelope, for example, and the meerkats are not scared of the antelope because they’re not a threat. So they treat us in much the same way that they treat an antelope. We can walk past, and they ignore us completely. They don’t look up at us, they don’t alarm when we approach. And so this allows us to collect natural behaviour.
We can observe them from close range. So habituation is an extremely powerful and useful tool. And meerkats are, in a way, are a fantastic half way house, because although they’re wild, we can also do a lot of things that normally you would expect to only be able to do with captive animals.
It’s very important to make sure that your experiments are realistic, that they are not looking at something that’s completely irrelevant to a meerkat’s life and to their, to their basic ecology. And so all the experiments that I do are grounded in vast amounts of observational data where we really understand what these animals are doing on a day-to-day basis, without being manipulated by, by me or by other experimenters.
Commentary
Observing animals in the wild allows researchers to study the evolution of animal behaviours and culture.
Alex Thornton
The main reason why I’m doing it, is to look at the evolutionary origins of culture, essentially. Culture is obviously something that’s fantastically important to human societies. And I’m seeking to understand its biological roots, how it is that animals can learn from each other, and what the consequences of this are.
One of the most interesting things I’ve been looking at recently is the question of whether meerkats teach. Now teaching is a trait that often thought of as exclusively human. We know that animals in many different species can learn by observing the actions of others, but it was thought that humans were unusual in that the wise change their behaviour to educate the naïve. We go out of our way to help others to learn. So I was interested in whether that might actually happen in meerkats.
Young pups need to learn how to catch and kill things like scorpions. So I was interested in whether adults would teach them how to do this. And in fact this is what seems to be the case.
So they will bring prey that’s alive, but it’s been modified. So if it’s a scorpion, they might bring a scorpion that is alive but that has had its sting removed, so the pup gets a chance to practise without being stung. Then, as the pups get older, they’re increasingly given fully intact prey.
So this video clip shows an example of a teaching interaction. So in this clip you can see an adult meerkat who’s biting the sting off this scorpion, he then allows a pup to come in and take the scorpion and the adult stays behind to monitor what the pup is doing so as you can see the pup is having quite a lot of difficulty handling the scorpion but the scorpion now has no sting, so there’s no danger that the pup will be stung. The adult remains here watching what the pup is doing. Often if the pup loses the scorpion the adult will catch it and bring it back again or if the pup is struggling the adult will modify it further, so as you can see now the pup has finally managed to grab the scorpion and run off with it…and off he goes.
Adults are giving pups opportunities to handle live prey, so does that make the pups learn faster than they would otherwise? So in order to test this, I ran an experiment where I randomly allocated pups to three different treatments. One treatment, the pups got additional opportunities to handle live scorpions, and they were given four live scorpions for three consecutive days. Some of their siblings in the, in another treatment were allocated to dead scorpions, so they were given the same number of scorpions over the same number of days. And then there was a third treatment, where the pups got an equivalent mass of hard-boiled egg, again, over three days. On the fourth day, I tested all the pups with a live scorpion. This was a sting-less scorpion, so there was no danger that the pup would get stung. And I found that the pups from the first treatment, the pups who were given live scorpions to practise with were much better, so they were less likely to lose the scorpion, they were less likely to get pincered on the nose, they were a lot quicker at handling the scorpion. So this really illustrates that practice makes perfect for meerkat pups.
Commentary
The study then looked at whether this behaviour was, in fact, active teaching by the adults.
Alex Thornton
I set about looking at whether, rather than teaching what pups know, adult meerkats might actually base their behaviour on simple cues that the pups are giving them.
So meerkat pups wander around the group making incessant begging calls. And the pups’ begging calls change as they get older, just as a child’s voice changes as it gets older. And so I recorded the begging calls of pups of different ages and played them back to groups. And I found that if you play the calls of old pups to a group with young pups, the adults start to bring live prey, even though the pups are too young to deal with it. Conversely, if you play the calls of young pups to a group with older pups, the adults flip their behaviour and start bringing dead prey. So this shows us how a simple cue governs rather complex, or seemingly complex, behaviour.
This really shows that the adults don’t understand what the pups know; they’re not intentionally setting about to correct the pups’ ignorance, but rather they’re responding to a simple cue. And by doing this, they help to promote learning in the pups.
Commentary
Alex Thornton’s studies have demonstrated that while meerkats do, in fact, teach their young how to hunt prey, they are not motivated to do so in the same ways that humans teach.
Alex Thornton
I think there is a danger of people reading human characteristics into the behaviour of animals, and this is something that we come across very often, especially in the popular press. And in a sense, a lot of the purpose of the sort of research that I do is to try and address these beliefs. Now what my research has shown is that meerkats can teach, but they do it using far simpler means.
So this really shows us how a seemingly complicated form of behaviour is governed by rather simple means. And it allows us to address these misapprehensions about the way that animals operate. The flipside of it is that it also allows us to look at the similarities. So it allows us to understand that humans are connected to the rest of the biological world, and to see what the relationship is between the minds and the behaviour of humans and other species. So by studying meerkats and chimpanzees and birds, we can begin to understand the evolutionary history of our own behaviour.