Meerkats Make Pretty Good Schoolmarms

Plenty of baby animals clearly learn from watching other animals including their parents, but scientists don’t often find mommies and daddies providing formal instruction. Thus Science magazine sees merit in a report from Cambridge researchers this week that meerkats, in South Africa, provide deliberate classes for their young. They show the pups how to eat insects by starting with dead ones and working their way up through injured to healthy ones, how to take the stingers from scorpions, and who knows, perhaps how to RSVP to a meerkat coffee klatsch (Well, they are very social). As the students master skills, such as controlling a grasshopper, writes the Telegraph’s Roger Highfield, the parents move on to tougher assignments. Often, they even teach others’ youngsters in the colony. But Highfield also throws in that the supposedly lovable meerkats are not entirely good role models for people — given the chance, females will kill and eat the young of rivals. That makes those noxious bumperstickers about one’s honor roll student children look more civil.

Stories:

AP Randolph E. Schmid; National Geographic News James Owen; The Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield; Times (UK) Lewis Smith;

Grist for the Mill: Cambridge U. Press Release;