It’s quite the “mob scene”—the San Diego Zoo’s Conrad Prebys Africa Rocks desert habitat provides guests the opportunity to observe a mob of meerkats interacting with their environment, and each other, as they would in the Kalahari Desert of arid southwest Africa. This matriarchal society is constantly in flux as each member of the mob works to feed themselves while evading predation and maintaining their status or attempting to increase their status among their group.
These diurnal mammals spend most of their waking hours above ground sunning, foraging, grooming, and resting in the shade during the heat of the day. During such active times, at least one member of the mob can be seen watching the sky and surrounding area from a high vantage point for potential threats at all times. This individual will make a low, constant vocalization, which is known as “the watchman’s song,” while there are no imminent threats, and then alarm call when a threat is identified. The type of vocalization used is specific to the type of threat observed, allowing each member of the mob to react to the threat accordingly, oftentimes by dashing to the safety of their underground tunnels. The type of stress evoked by an alarm call is eustress, or a moderate type of short-lived stress that has a positive result. Eustress is experienced by humans during exercise, at which time the mind and body endure moderate levels of stress to lead to a boost in mood and better long-term health. Similarly, meerkats experience alarm call-induced eustress multiple times a day as a means of survival.
Group Dynamics
As obligate cooperative breeders, meerkats benefit from living in mobs of up to 50 individuals. Larger mobs allow individual meerkats to allocate less time to watching for threats and instead spend more time on self-maintenance, foraging, resting, and breeding behaviors. In fact, breeding success in meerkats has been shown to significantly increase as meerkat mobs grow. The matriarch of a mob changes, on average, every three years. Usually the largest and oldest female secures a place as the matriarch and can give birth up to four times a year if resources are sufficient. The mob works together to help raise these pups, and this behavior, though it seems altruistic, may in fact be self-serving. Most female members of the mob are related, and females hoping to become the matriarch may bide their time helping raise other young that are distantly related before assuming the matriarchy to have their own young. While the mob sounds like a cooperative utopia on paper, in action, it can be anything but peaceful.
At least one member of every meerkat colony serves as a lookout, watching for any threats that may approach.
A Proposed Change in Care
The primary daily focus of wildlife care specialists is to create opportunities for our wildlife that encourage both mental and physical fitness. Measurable outcomes of good welfare can vary between species, but an increase in behavioral diversity in any species is perceived as an increase in welfare. Specialists work to provide opportunities for our wildlife to thrive based on their natural history and in a way that allows them choice and control over how they interact with their environment. Complicated, ever-changing group dynamics—like that of the meerkat mob—make this task more challenging.
It is not uncommon for meerkats to be run out of their mob over hierarchy changes in the arid, sandy savannas of Africa. In a zoological setting, however, such disputes require specialist intervention and can lead to a separation of mob members into two smaller mobs to reduce aggression. In fall 2023, the San Diego Zoo found itself in such a situation, with four female meerkats living in two separate mobs. While separation is a widely accepted and ethical practice, San Diego Zoo meerkat specialists set out to reimagine a management style that would encourage the mob to reduce aggression on their own terms and stay cohesive. Specialists identified that success of this management style could be measured by a decrease in tumultuous interactions between individuals, an increase in individual behavioral diversity, and, eventually, greater breeding success.
Using outcome-based care, wildlife care specialists worked backward from the desired behaviors of a cohesive meerkat mob to identify the inputs necessary to achieve such success. Specialists hypothesized that breeding success and increased time for self-maintenance are most likely secondary motivations for cohesion in a mob. The primary motivation for this obligate cohesive lifestyle was hypothesized to be the safety provided by increased mob size. Meerkat specialists suspect the reason cohesive mobs thrive in native habitats is in part due to the regular threats they face from extreme weather, predators, and lack of resources. Meerkats in our San Diego mob experience six to eight foraging opportunities a day, very few predators, and near-perfect temperatures year-round. By redirecting the type of eustress being experienced in the mob, specialists hoped to strengthen the bond of the mob members.
The newest meerkat pups at the San Diego Zoo were born to first-time dam Shaka and raised by sire Bafana and aunts Msizi and Mava.
Reaching Out, Focusing In
Wildlife care specialists identified there were a number of inputs available on Zoo grounds that could be offered to the meerkat mob during times of elevated aggression to redirect the current eustress from internal factors (other meerkats) to external factors (potential threats). Meerkat specialists first worked to rotate the two mobs past each other on an increasingly regular schedule to cue both mobs that there was another mob inhabiting the same area. During this time, an increase in explorative and scent marking behaviors was observed, indicating the meerkats were aware of each other’s presence. Next we coordinated with wildlife care specialists around the Zoo to acquire various novel scents that could be added to the meerkat habitat to mimic the presence of large or destructive wildlife in the area.
On the day the two mobs were to be reintroduced, all meerkats were brought into an indoor space adjacent to the large habitat and kept separate from each other while specialists placed feces from large and destructive herbivores (elephant, giraffe, and babirusa) throughout the habitat. Specialists observed the reintroduction, ready to intervene if needed, and the two mobs were released at the same time. Immediately all four female meerkats, with tails raised, began independently inspecting each pile of feces while vocalizing using a similar call. After 10 minutes of investigation, all four meerkats had retreated independently down the same tunnel. Nearly two hours after they disappeared, a cohesive mob of four female meerkats ventured back above ground to forage. Over the next two weeks, specialists observed the individuals of the mob spending more time on self-maintenance behaviors than they had when they were in two separate mobs. A few months later, the same management technique was used to successfully introduce a young male to the mob.
Thrilled with the repeated success, specialists shared this management technique with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ Small Carnivore Taxon Advisory Group and enlisted other facilities to attempt this technique and share their results. To date, at least two other zoos have successfully introduced meerkats using the same method and, as a result of our mob’s reunification, the San Diego Zoo had our first successful litter of meerkat pups born since 2018. Aggression is a natural part of life in a meerkat mob, but using the implication of danger by adding scent cues (wolf urine, elephant feces) or visual and auditory cues (eagle kite, playing recorded hawk calls) during moments of heightened internal eustress can help redirect the mob to prioritize safety and reduce injuries, leading to increased welfare for each individual and an increase in breeding success for the mob.
