LONDON: Humans aren't the only smart species to educate their young. Meerkats in South Africa's Kuruman Reserve were found 'teaching' their young how to obtain food. The methods employed by these animals were quite in line with the basic principles of teaching, a team of researchers observed.
Alex Thornton and Katherine MacAuliffe of the University of Cambridge closely followed groups of these animals over a number of years and found that meerkat pups are given survival lessons by older meerkats.
Teaching methods progress from very simple to tougher as the young meerkats get older, as was demonstrated in the way adults bring prey for the young. They first bring dead prey (such as a lizard), then injured or disabled prey and then finally live but harmless prey – such as a scorpion with its poisonous stinger bitten off. If prey a escapes from the pup's clutches, the adult meerkat will nudge it back towards the pup.
The principles behind the behavior tallied with the criteria applied for teaching, such as: modifying one's behavior to instruct a young and naïve individual; and the learner – the young individual, picking up the skills faster than if it were to use the exploratory method of foraging alone.
The effort in this case involved a cost for the teacher: the adult meerkat had to make time to find suitable prey, disable it and give it to the begging meerkat pup and watch over its incompetent efforts. The time could have been used foraging food for itself, especially because their food comprises hard-to-catch, even dangerous prey, like scorpions which have to be hunted down. And the older meerkats are not necessarily the parents, the researchers emphasize.
The benefits from the teaching are also clear, the researchers said. The period of the pups' dependence is reduced, their survival chances are increased and group strength is ensured – group size is an important factor for survival among most animals.
These activities prove that meerkats do not leave their young to learn survival techniques simply by observing or the harder way – by foraging on their own.
The animal lives in groups with a well-defined social structure. In every group a dominant couple's own brood forms nearly 80 percent of the group strength. Other members in the group share the responsibilities of rearing and keeping a protective eye on the young. A group can include from three to forty meerkats and their natural habitat is the dry arid regions of Southern Africa.
The British researchers' report is published in the latest issue of the journal Science. Thornton stressed the need for more research into the evolution of teaching “if we are to further our knowledge of human cultural evolution”, because the findings have established that teaching can evolve in a species' behavior even if it doesn't have the highly developed consciousness that humans possess.
