Humans teach their children, but teaching has been very difficult to demonstrate in other species. Meerkats may be one exception...


School's in Session for Meerkats

By Michael Balter
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 July 2006

Most learning in the animal kingdom seems to take place passively, for example by watching what other members of the species are doing. But a new study conducted in the Kalahari Desert of South Africa concludes that adult meerkats actively teach their young how to catch their food, suggesting that hands-on teaching might be more widespread than previously thought.

Animal behavior experts have usually defined teaching according to three stringent criteria proposed in 1992 by Tim Caro of the University of California, Davis, and Marc Hauser of Harvard University: The teacher must modify its behavior only when a student is present; the teacher must incur some personal cost or at least not immediately benefit from teaching; and the student must learn more rapidly than it would have if the teacher were not present. In January, a team finally found an animal--ants--that fulfilled these criteria.

In the new study, published in this week's Science, Alex Thornton and Katherine McAuliffe of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom monitored meerkat feeding behavior at South Africa's Kuruman River Reserve, which is also the location for the popular television animal soap opera Meerkat Manor. Meerkats eat a variety of fast prey, including insects, lizards, and poisonous scorpions. Adults feed young pups in response to their begging calls, killing or disabling the prey and removing the stingers of scorpions.

Thornton and McAuliffe observed that the adults gradually did less to disable the prey as the pups grew older. Because the bleating calls of pups are known to change as they mature, growing lower in pitch and less repetitive, the researchers played recorded begging from pups of different ages to see whether adults modified their behavior. When the sounds of pups older than those actually in the group were played, the adults provided much more live prey; when the sounds of younger pups were played, the adults provided more dead prey.

Adult meerkats also engaged in other behavior to encourage pups to grapple with live prey, including nudging the food towards them and watching how they handled it. Thornton and McAuliffe conclude that meerkats engage in "opportunity teaching," in which the adults actively make it easier for their young students to learn to handle live prey. This doesn't require complex thinking such as the deliberate intention to enlighten ignorant pupils, they say.

Hauser comments that the findings are "certainly consistent" with the criteria for teaching. But he adds that in the last several years, evidence of more advanced cognition in animals has been "streaming in" (Science, 23 June, p. 1734), possibly requiring a change in the definition. If so, Hauser says, the jury might still be out on whether adult meerkats are teaching their young or merely engaging in stimulus-response behavior: "If pup is young, bring dead prey. If old, bring live prey."