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ZooNooz Article - JUNE 2009
Not just a mere cat
Story by Darcy Shedden,
Photographs Bobby-Jo Vial and Deborah Olsen
Meerkat |
Say the word "Meerkat" to any
animal lover, and immediately visions
spring to mind of an appealing,
sandy-coloured animal, either
standing tall on its hind feet, or
gambolling along with its tail stuck
straight up into the air, or sitting
on its backside enjoying the sun.
Watching pups trying to perform
these tricky feats, rolling over time
and time again, is a pleasure in itself.
Born in January to mother Malawi,
Zanzibar and Nairobi are now almost
fully weaned and are well and truly
"out and about" in the enclosure
under the watchful eyes of the entire
Meerkat gang.
Taronga currently has 11
Meerkats: four males, five females and
the "just-determined" female pups.
Bob, the alpha male, is assumed to be
the father of the two new offspring.
Their mum, Malawi, is the daughter of
the alpha female, Kenya. These two
females, together with Kenya’s three
other daughters, arrived in 2007 from
Mogo Zoo on the south coast of NSW,
to create a new bloodline for the
Australasian region. Thanks to Bob
and Malawi, they have already made a
great start. It also appears that seeing
the new pups has kick-started the
maternal instincts of another of the
females, so we are looking forward to
more pups in the Meerkat enclosure
in the future.
Named in 1776 by the first white
people to colonise South Africa,
Meerkat is a Dutch word meaning
"marsh cat". We now know that
"Meerkat" is a misnomer. This pointynosed,
striped carnivore with its
beautiful black goggle eyes is actually
a type of mongoose, which lives in
the dry open savannah and desert
environments of southern Africa.
Here, the alternating hard and soft
soils suit their lifestyle – soft sand
for easier digging to find insects, and
hard stable soil for building their vital
underground tunnel systems. They
also love heat, so much so that they
have a dark-coloured "solar panel"
of skin on their bellies which they
expose to the sun to warm themselves
up on cold winter days. This is totally
the opposite of our koala, whose lightcoloured
stomach fur acts as a type of
cooling system in our hot climate.
In the wild, Meerkats live in tight
communities, each with its own alpha
breeding pair and their offspring.
Females can breed up to three times
each year and give birth to as many
as four or five pups at a time. They
are extremely social within their own
group, where life is dominated by
community duties: mutual hunting,
grooming, baby-sitting, sentry duty
and the feeding and protection of the
young. They also collectively mob
together and ferociously drive off
threats, such as other Meerkats, and
predators, such as eagles, jackals and
other, larger mongooses.
Communication is frequent
between members of the gang.
Their amazingly large vocabulary
consists of over 20 different sounds,
from beeping and growling through
to alarm calls, pup-feeding calls,
guarding calls, foraging calls and
"lost" calls, which are howled
out by pups when they have been
forgotten during a move.
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The group often shifts between
a number of burrows within its own
territory – both to avoid predators
and to allow the insect population
in the immediate area to re-establish
itself. Before leaving a burrow, the
alpha male will mark the entrance
with his scent to deter other
Meerkats from moving in during the
gang’s absence. The use of scent as
an identifier of family members is
vital to all Meerkats, because at close
range (up to six metres), their sense
of smell is far superior to their vision
– if you don’t smell right you may just
end up being ostracised by your own
family! Long-distance vision, though,
is excellent, meaning that aerial
predators, such as eagles, are readily
seen. Food is more often found by
scent than by sight, and it is rolled
over and over in the front paws until
it is determined to be edible.
Meerkats are daytime feeders –
night is far too hazardous a time to
be away from their burrows – and
they have a varied diet of worms,
grasshoppers, ant larvae, eggs,
fruit and even poisonous insects,
to which they seem immune.
Thanks to Taronga’s Live Animal
Production Unit (also called The
Bug House), we are able to supply
them with many of these in the zoo
environment as well.
Here at Taronga, the life span of
our Meerkats is about 13 years – a few
years more than in the wild. Zanzibar
and Nairobi have been growing
rapidly since their birth only a few
months ago. It won’t be long now
before you won’t be able to tell the
difference between them and their
parents.
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