Helen FieldsScience Writer

Today for ScienceNOW  I wrote about meerkats – you know, the adorable critters – oh, did you need a picture? Here:

It’s from a long-term study site in the Kalahari desert. Most of the research there has to do with the evolution of cooperation; meerkats are social animals who live in groups. If you’re going to follow the meerkats all day, you need to be there when they first poke their noses out of the sleeping burrow.

In summer, some groups get up as early as 5 a.m. “We have to get up at ludicrous hours of the morning to get there on time,” says behavioral ecologist Alex Thornton. But the scientists who work there also know something else: “There are certain groups, where if you are going there in the morning, you can have a bit of a lie-in” – because they consistently get up later. Thornton and some colleagues analyzed 11 years of data and found that their sense was right – some groups consistently get up early, and some consistently get up later.

The researchers concluded that this is evidence of a tradition, a controversial concept in the non-human animal world. They looked at all kinds of characteristics of the sleeping burrows, but couldn’t find any other reason that would explain some groups getting up later. This could even be true in the same burrow – “You might find that group A use a burrow and they get up late and group B use the same burrow a few days later and get up early,” Thornton says. And it’s not genetic; if a new meerkat comes in, it learns what everybody else does.

See my very short story (and one more meerkat picture) here.

Photos: Alex Thornton