Meerkat on sentry duty-- the Leader of the Mob! "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse."
This meerkat, (Suricata suricatta) is a member of the mongoose family and lives in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana, and South Africa. This one was in a zoo and was clearly on sentry duty. Meerkats take turns being on sentry duty for about an hour while the other members of the group (called a mob or clan), spend their time foraging. These are some of the most interesting animals I've ever seen and are generally fun to watch. As you can tell from the look on this one's face, it looked as stoic as one of the guards at Buckingham Palace. He had a stiff upper lip and was more than willing to stare me down for aiming a camera at him.
On one hand, the meerkats are very altruistic sharing duties such as sentry duty and mentoring pups. However, the Alpha pair generally do not allow other meerkats to mate and will sometimes kill the pups born to any other female. They sometimes eject the female for violating their ruling authority. However, I didn't see that the offending male ever gets ejected. Guess he couldn't be identified. Meerkats make many different types of sounds and not all have been deciphered. The barking and shrieking of the sentry if he spies danger was an easy one to figure out. I'm sure National Geographic will continue working to decipher the rest of their language! Some of those words may have to be censored.......if they're saying what I think this one was saying to me.
Meerkat on sentry duty-- the Leader of the Mob! "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse."
This meerkat, (Suricata suricatta) is a member of the mongoose family and lives in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana, and South Africa. This one was in a zoo and was clearly on sentry duty. Meerkats take turns being on sentry duty for about an hour while the other members of the group (called a mob or clan), spend their time foraging. These are some of the most interesting animals I've ever seen and are generally fun to watch. As you can tell from the look on this one's face, it looked as stoic as one of the guards at Buckingham Palace. He had a stiff upper lip and was more than willing to stare me down for aiming a camera at him.
On one hand, the meerkats are very altruistic sharing duties such as sentry duty and mentoring pups. However, the Alpha pair generally do not allow other meerkats to mate and will sometimes kill the pups born to any other female. They sometimes eject the female for violating their ruling authority. However, I didn't see that the offending male ever gets ejected. Guess he couldn't be identified. Meerkats make many different types of sounds and not all have been deciphered. The barking and shrieking of the sentry if he spies danger was an easy one to figure out. I'm sure National Geographic will continue working to decipher the rest of their language! Some of those words may have to be censored.......if they're saying what I think this one was saying to me.