Meerkats: Secrets of an Animal Superstar Natural World

Meet Squirt and Weeny.

And their proud mum, Klinky.

They belong to one of the most famous families on the planet.

True celebrities and a global phenomenon.

They're part of a dynasty that has led to hours of television,

films and even their own fan club.

I love them so much,

because they are full of love

in their daily life.

Behind this popularity lies a truly remarkable 20-year field study.

A ground-breaking project

started by a scientist who wanted to find out

what meerkats can teach us about cooperation.

It's taken two decades, and some remarkable experiments,

to unravel the mysteries of their complex lives.

Enabling us to understand

and appreciate the challenges facing the likes of Klinky

and her celebrated clan.

These people are in love.

They've travelled thousands of miles to be here,

in the Kalahari Desert,

in Southern Africa.

As soon as the TV series Meerkat Manor was broadcast in 2005,

the meerkats were catapulted to international stardom.

I love the meerkats.

I love to be around them, walk with them

and, you know, watch what they do every day.

I do believe they have characters and personality.

It's interesting to people who are not researchers,

but who just love the animals.

They cooperate together, work as a team

and just like a human family.

Some members of the Appreciation Society have gone

to remarkable lengths to express their affection.

The first one I painted actually is Flower. She is a superstar,

I believe, for most people that know her and she's my favourite.

The second one I painted, she is Mozart.

Unfortunately, she cannot have a good family.

So I painted her in heaven with her boyfriend and finally,

they have a kid together

to form a really good and happy family.

No-one can doubt that meerkats have become truly global celebrities.

And now, in the Kalahari, there are a new set of stars in the making.

This is the Kung Fu clan.

A 30-strong group of meerkats.

One female rules a meerkat clan

and in charge of the Kung Fu is eight-year-old Klinky.

Her loyal partner is Ningaloo.

He and Kinky have been together for most of their lives,

they have a powerful bond.

It's the beginning of the dry season.

Baking days are followed by freezing nights.

In the early morning light,

they stretch out

and warm up their frozen bones.

The 30-strong members of the Kung Fu

are made up of Klinky and Ningaloo's

sons and daughters.

And there are more on the way.

Klinky is pregnant.

Her next litter of pups is due in just six weeks.

She'll need plenty of help to raise her youngsters

in the unforgiving dry season.

But needs must,

and the group will soon set out

and see what they can dig out of the sand.

ALARM CLOCK RINGS

At the Meerkat Project base,

the core team of graduate volunteers are getting ready for a new day.

They are at the heart of what has grown into one of

the most comprehensive studies of animal behaviour ever undertaken.

It's a highly organised operation with PhD students

and visiting professors and a core team of 12 volunteer researchers.

They are setting out into the desert to find, record,

and weigh members of the 18 meerkat groups

which are dispersed over 39 square miles.

The researchers are careful

that any interaction they have with the meerkats

affects their behaviour as little as possible.

The team must let the animals get on with their lives.

Even so, it's hard not to get attached.

Don't worry. Come on.

'You try to be, of course, scientific'

and not get involved with them

but no, of course, they have different personalities

and that's the amazing thing of meerkats,

and...humanising them to a certain point.

It's a kind of a 'pinch yourself' kind of moment

that I'm actually doing this.

I feel very lucky.

Come on. Out you go.

None of this would have existed without the work

of Cambridge zoologist Professor Tim Clutton-Brock,

a world authority on animal behaviour.

Since 1993, he's been at the helm of the Kalahari Meerkat Project.

HE HUMS

His mission in this study is to discover exactly

what makes the meerkat the most cooperative mammal on Earth.

This walking home with the group in front of you,

walking back in the evening, always seems like an enormous privilege.

HE HUMS

Tim had been searching for the right animal to study

for quite a while.

And it was a television programme

that first sparked his interest in meerkats.

'No bigger than a tassel on a lion's tale,

'a meerkat stands tall.'

I saw a film called Meerkats United,

and I realised that meerkats were exactly what I was looking for.

A really cooperative mammal, where I could learn to recognise individuals

and see what everyone was doing.

He was hooked.

So I headed off to the Kalahari and my life changed.

Life is also about to change for the Kung Fu clan.

Before Klinky led the group out to forage,

there's a problem to be dealt with.

Her family are on edge.

Even partner Ningaloo stays out of the way.

Pregnant Klinky is on the warpath.

Klinky spots her daughter Mrs McGee.

She has decided that her days in the group are numbered.

Mrs McGee is about to be banished.

She tries to protect herself

by being submissive to her mother.

It's not going to help.

Klinky bites her viciously.

Mrs McGee is not wanted.

Klinky is merciless.

Two more daughters get the same treatment.

Klinky is banishing into exile

any daughters who are or could become pregnant.

But then, she spots something.

Bebe, the weakest of these daughters,

is trying not to be noticed.

She almost gets away with it.

Klinky wants to make sure the group raises just one set of offspring -

her own.

They're all fighting for limited resources,

any competition would put Klinky's pups under threat.

She won't let that happen.

Klinky has driven four of her daughters out of her family.

They watch forlornly from a safe distance.

Life for them in exile is going to be tough.

However brutal this seems,

Klinky is prepared to go much further

to protect her unborn pups, if she needs to.

Tim Clutton-Brock's decision to work with meerkats led him here,

to the Southern Kalahari, in 1993.

Eventually, he and his team discovered an empty farm

on the border between South Africa and Botswana.

In this desolate environment, he saw at first-hand

how meerkats could be the perfect mammal to study,

IF you could get close to them.

The environment is so open that when I saw them, I thought,

"Wow, here you can really see everything that they're doing."

If only it were possible to habituate several different groups,

then we could really get on top

of answering important questions about them.

Habituation is the process of getting an animal

to become so completely unafraid of you that you are ignored.

HE HUMS

If Tim could manage this, he could get close enough to study them

without the meerkats minding.

Meerkats don't make friends with strangers easily

and there are no shortcuts when it comes to breaking into their world.

It would take the team years of walking amongst the meerkats

in the bush, always announcing themselves with a gentle hum.

HE HUMS

I can still see them in the distance

and they're not actually running away yet.

But they're gradually moving off.

And if I kept pressing them, they would run quickly.

So what I'm trying to do is to tell them that it's me.

HE HUMS

I'm not trying to hide from them at all.

After thousands of hours of hard graft,

they could now get to within a few feet of a number

of meerkat families.

HE HUMS

It was a remarkable achievement.

Now, the work could begin.

If the meerkats were truly cooperating,

each individual member of the group would be doing better

than if they were living on their own.

To test this theory,

Tim needed to measure the costs and benefits of them helping each other

by measuring if they were gaining or losing weight.

How was he to get the meerkats to agree to that?

He began by trying to lure them with every food he could think of.

Anything that might tickle a meerkat's taste buds.

Mealworms.

Chicken.

Peanut butter.

Condensed milk.

We tried everything we could find to see if they would eat it...

..but they weren't interested at all.

Despite Tim's best culinary efforts,

the meerkats turned up their noses at everything.

The team had noticed that there was one food

that they would go all out to get hold of -

plover's eggs.

It led them to try something new.

For plover's eggs, Tim tried hen's eggs.

We thought we'd see whether they were interested

in the contents of the eggs.

But what we found out was that

they weren't in the slightest bit interested.

But then, Tim saw meerkats devouring a hen's egg

that had cooked in the sun.

In the end, our lives changed totally when we discovered this.

After two years of valiant failures,

this was a eureka moment.

Crumbs of boiled egg don't change the meerkats' behaviour in the wild,

but they do make them cooperative.

This discovery was the kick-start the Kalahari Meerkat project needed.

SHE HUMS

Hey, my love, come!

Hello, my love, yum-yum.

More researchers began to join Tim on his project.

Now, they could begin to gather proper data on the meerkats.

When working with a group,

they would weigh an individual three times a day.

When they get up, at midday

and just before they went to sleep.

With radio collars, they would never be lost.

All the individuals were given their own codes and computer files.

And names.

Now, Tim could start to find answers to his big questions.

Why does a meerkat actually want to live in a group?

Why do they help each other out?

And when they do, how do they know what job to do?

The study could now get underway,

all because of the meerkats' love of a tiny snack.

At the Kung Fu, with the threatening females out of the way,

Klinky leads her group into the increasingly dry

and unforgiving bush.

On the surface, there's little for them here, in this ancient desert,

but Klinky is an experienced hunter.

If they dig through enough sand, they'll find sufficient grubs

and scorpions to feed them all for the day.

However, the Kung Fu aren't simply predators.

They're also prey.

There is a real danger of death descending from the skies.

But meerkats have an early warning system.

The sentinel.

Their job is to keep a lookout

so the rest of the Kung Fu can keep their eyes down

and focus on finding food.

When Tim first came across the meerkat sentinel, he was fascinated.

HE HUMS

With his trusty boiled egg,

he investigated how devoted

they were to their task.

I'm going to show you something that I tried, 20 years ago, to show this.

I'm going to offer this guy some of his favourite food, some egg.

The meerkat has a job to do

and won't be swayed.

He's on duty, he's watching for predators

and his mind is obviously fixed on that.

He's just not interested in other things.

It's vital for meerkats

to have a fully-focused sentinel on guard at all times.

Foraging meerkats glance up at the sentinel occasionally

to check it's still there.

They quickly notice if no-one appears to be on duty.

Tim is recreating an experiment to show this.

Very slowly.

Very slowly.

We are now going to block their view of the sentinel

so they can't actually see whether the sentinel's on duty.

From the group's point of view,

it looks as though the sentinel has vanished.

They are concerned and will react.

There's someone over there now

who's going up on sentinel duty to replace him.

Individuals put themselves up for sentinel duty,

usually after they've had a good meal.

Tim proved this by feeding individuals

with extra hard boiled egg.

As a result, they were happy to spend longer on watch.

Sentinels look up at the sky for threats,

but they'll also spot danger

closer to the ground.

And working as a group,

they can together intimidate many of the most dangerous animals here.

Even a predator that can kill them, such as a cobra.

They stay just out of striking distance.

And, eventually, the cobra feels outnumbered.

Cooperation is at the heart of what they do.

Every member of the family has an important role to play,

so why does the dominant female

throw out some important members, such as her daughters?

The dry season is beginning to bite,

and the Kung Fu females driven out by Klinky are desperate.

They hang around on the fringes,

perhaps hoping that Klinky might tolerate their return.

But she has no intention of doing so.

The evictees are stressed.

Over the last few days, they've lost weight.

As a small group,

there are too few of them for one to act as a sentinel.

When they're out foraging,

they are vulnerable to being picked off by predators.

But Klinky is tough.

She pulls together the rest of her group, who are under her spell.

There's no room for sympathy.

To chase away the daughters,

the Kung Fu war dance

in a fearsome display of solidarity.

The outcasts scurry away into the desert,

driven back into exile.

As Tim's volume of data increased,

so the natural order behind the meerkats'

apparently brutal behaviour

began to reveal itself.

Dominant females evict their daughters

when they reach breeding age - around three years old.

Females that enforce this system

can rear up to 80 pups over the course of their lives.

And a big group equals strength

when defending your territory.

The lengths to which a dominant female will go

to control her daughters and retain her power knows no bounds.

It's dusk at the Kung Fu burrow.

After a long day, the chance for the family

to groom and bond.

Their attention has been grabbed by intruders.

Klinky's outcasts still haven't given up,

they are now trying to find a way back,

under cover of twilight.

Klinky has clocked them.

The tribe joins together

and war dance towards the outcasts,

to deter them.

Once more, Klinky's daughters will have to find somewhere else

to spend the night.

Klinky has driven them out to put them under pressure,

especially those that may be pregnant.

The stress of survival outside the group means evicted daughters

will often give birth to their pups prematurely.

If Klinky chances upon any live-born young, she will kill them.

Infanticide.

However brutal this seems, Klinky knows

that if any of her daughters continued their pregnancies,

they might try to kill her own pups,

so it pays to be aggressive.

In future, her daughters will be of use to her,

but for now, they're nothing but a threat.

Ten years in, Tim and his team

had increased the number of habituated meerkat groups to 15

and they'd monitored the complete life histories

of nearly 1,000 individuals.

A community in the desert had become a hub

of world-class scientific activity.

The study branched out into new areas,

involving scientists who had worked here as students.

They started to tackle questions based on Tim's previous research.

One of the first things he had noticed was that meerkats

talk to each other all the time,

making a huge range of calls.

And that raised questions about what they were saying to each other,

and what the calls meant.

Professor Marta Manser is a research biologist at Zurich University.

She was Tim's first PhD student on the project.

She set about investigating meerkat communication

with a series of ingenious experiments.

If you put it here, behind the bush.

Props are set up before the meerkats emerge from their sleeping burrows.

Live predators would be difficult to use

so, instead, Marta chose the next best thing.

MEERKATS TRILL

She recorded their alarm calls and discovered the meerkats

had developed a series of call types, a kind of language,

to warn the others of how close a predator is.

THEY TRILL

And what type it is.

TRILLING INTENSIFIES

MEERKATS BARK

As the jackal gets closer,

the meerkats identify the ground predator

and prepare for an emergency.

Marta spent several months

presenting various predators to see if the calls were different.

THEY BARK

She even launched a jackal into the air

to see if meerkats' calls

distinguish between ground and aerial predators.

The results of that experiment were inconclusive,

but her other revelations to date have been remarkable.

Meerkats have evolved a complex warning system.

TRILLING

The sounds they make to warn of aerial or terrestrial predators

change as the threat grows closer.

TRILLING INTENSIFIES

BARKING

Marta and her colleagues have discovered that the meerkats

are speaking with a complex repertoire of calls.

The messages they send each other are distinct

and the meaning is very clear.

Play them your choice of recording

and you can predict exactly how they will react.

CHIRPING

GROWLING

This sound means

"bird of prey approaching fast."

CHIRPING INTENSIFIES

It's quiet at the burrow.

Klinky has not surfaced.

Soon, it's clear why.

At last, Klinky has given birth to her precious pups -

Squirt and Weeny.

They have been underground for 14 days.

And today, they emerge into the sunshine for the first time.

Their eyes have only just opened.

In front of them is their first view of their new home.

The harsh but beautiful Kalahari.

The family has grown in other ways too.

Three days after the pups were born,

Klinky allowed her evicted daughters back into the group.

Now that she's had her pups,

the females are no longer a threat.

Quite the opposite.

They're put to work straightaway,

as babysitters to Squirt and Weeny.

These females are often able to provide milk,

so as well as keeping a lookout,

they suckle the new pups.

In return, they enjoy the safety

of being part of a big group once more.

They take 12-hour shifts

and are so dedicated to the job

that they won't leave the pups for a minute,

even if they are starving.

But the calm is soon shattered.

Klinky has spotted something suspicious.

The family leaps into action.

Everyone has a role.

The babysitters move quickly to protect the pups.

Her daughters are useful now,

but they've brought trouble in their wake.

Three roving males from a rival group

are looking to mate with Klinky's daughters.

These are unwelcome visitors.

If they break into the group,

they could even try to overthrow her partner, Ningaloo,

and disrupt the Kung Fu.

Klinky's pups would be at their mercy.

The stakes couldn't be higher.

Klinky is on the offensive, backed up by Ningaloo.

The rest of the family follow.

The males slink away.

For now, the Kung Fu have dealt with the threat.

But the roving males could be back at any time.

The meerkats are so comfortable having observers around

that, simply by being amongst them,

the team can discover the most remarkable things.

Unlike the females, male meerkats begin to leave their families

when they are three years old -

they can't mate with their sisters.

At this time, they visit other groups

and Tim has always wanted to understand

how these roving males get on.

HE HUMS

The rover has got his eye on a female from a rival group.

It's a risky business.

He is being chased repeatedly by the males from this group.

And if they can catch him,

there's a danger they'll kill him.

So rovers that get too close

and get caught by the opposition,

not uncommonly get killed.

So they're quite jumpy.

And, as you can see, they're...

a bit careful about being seen, so they tend to go

creepy-crawly and then, look out all the time.

But he's absolutely not thinking about feeding,

his mind is on sex.

Roving males are so overcome with lust that they rarely stop to eat.

They can spend days at a time chasing the object of their desire.

But it's a risk worth taking.

He'll just stay on the edge

and keep coming and keep going again,

and he'll try and get access to one of the females behind a bush.

This rover has pushed his luck too far

and has disturbed a male foraging on the edge of the group.

His cover is blown.

Ah, look, here the group is in war dance,

so the group are now actually taking this seriously

and instead of one male chasing him,

the whole group are now chasing him.

To a meerkat, a whole group war dancing is extremely intimidating

and it's not difficult to understand why he keeps his distance

when the whole group have their eyes on him.

A dominant male's only chance of breeding

is to leave his own group and either join or found another one

with unrelated females.

The chances of success are slim,

but a male meerkat has to make a go of it,

if his particular genetic line isn't to die out.

THUNDER RUMBLES

A storm, swollen with rain, passes overhead.

It should signal the end of the dry season

and bring the first rains of the year.

By night, a huge electrical storm threatens.

But the clouds haven't let go of their rain.

As the temperature rises, a drought is imminent.

The Kung Fu are still waiting for the rains to arrive.

Pups Squirt and Weeny are now six weeks old and fully weaned.

They need to find solid food somewhere in this bone-dry desert.

They accompany their family on foraging trips,

but they're still too young to catch their own food.

They make endless begging calls,

but their parents, Klinky and Ningaloo, don't respond.

THEY TRILL

They're not being ignored.

THEY TRILL

In the newly restored family,

there are 25 other meerkats available to help.

The subordinate helpers give away

up to half the food they catch.

They look after the pups' needs as much as their own.

But Squirt and Weeny won't always get this much help.

Over the next two months, they will have to learn to feed themselves.

As Tim's project grew in size,

the researchers who joined the team

were rapidly moving into new areas.

It was clear that a complex form of cooperation is at the heart

of the meerkat family.

Now, some of the scientists wanted to look at things

like innovation, learning and tradition.

Over the last ten years,

Dr Alex Thornton has designed a series

of tests to try to find out how information spreads through meerkat

societies and how they innovate.

I designed a series of innovation tasks to look at which individuals

in groups would be likely to innovate solutions to new problems.

In this experiment, a scorpion is served to a meerkat

in a modified lunch box.

To get to the snack,

its instinct is to try and take route one

through the clear plastic walls.

But some meerkats can learn to put aside that instinct

and take a different approach.

There's another way in.

Turn the lid.

In fact, the individuals that were likely to solve them

were low-ranking subordinate individuals, and particularly males.

Dominant individuals were able to get food by stealing,

so they don't need to innovate.

It's the low-ranking individuals that need to innovate

because, essentially, necessity is the mother of invention.

And especially the males, because it's the males

who will leave their natal group,

to go and look for breeding opportunities elsewhere,

so they're really going to face hardship when they leave.

And it pays for them

to try and figure out new ways of getting food.

In the desert, a meerkat has to be very inventive

and eat just about anything it can get its paws on.

Millipedes, lizards,

sand frogs and even snakes

are all on the menu.

If a meerkat had a choice,

it'd go for a scorpion every time.

It has a nasty sting and tough claws,

but it's packed full of protein.

Over time, the meerkats have worked out exactly how to take them on.

Where to hold them down.

Where to crunch.

To Squirt, it looks like a game and he wants to join in.

But not yet.

Alex was fascinated by how quickly meerkats learned

to solve quite tricky problems.

Over the years, various studies suggested

that the young of some species are taught problem-solving by adults,

but it had never been clearly demonstrated.

If it could be proved with meerkats,

it would mean that meerkats could do something that, at the time,

had only ever been observed in one other mammal -

humans.

Squirt and Weeny need to learn how to kill a scorpion for themselves.

So the older helpers are going to teach them.

The first step is for the teacher to remove the sting

and then leave them to tackle a live but harmless scorpion.

When they can handle that, the next step is to teach them

how to bite the sting off a live scorpion for themselves.

At the time, it was an important discovery

because it was the first evidence

that wild animals do teach.

It was commonly thought that teaching was something that

happened only in human societies.

So by finding evidence for teaching in meerkats,

we could begin to start to piece together a puzzle

of how teaching might have evolved,

so we were able to look at how the meerkats teach.

Now that Alex had pieced this together,

he began to look at another intriguing aspect

of meerkat behaviour.

Just like us, they have different levels of enthusiasm

about leaping out of bed in the morning.

It's not just the parents

who struggle to get their pups out of the burrow.

For whole families, there's a tradition of early rising

or having a lie-in that never changes, even over years.

And it's passed down

from generation to generation.

Over a period of more than a decade,

we'll find that one neighbouring group will get up late,

another neighbouring group will get up early.

And, in fact, we can almost set our alarm clocks by it.

So just as you don't have afternoon tea in France,

but you do in England,

the meerkats show specific traditions to their groups.

Once he had discovered one tradition amongst meerkats,

he wanted to see if other traditions could be passed

from individual to individual.

So he devised an experiment to test this.

He wanted to know if a meerkat could recognise a shape for a reward,

and if other meerkats

could learn to follow this new tradition.

So what we did is that in some groups of meerkats,

we trained one individual, who we called the demonstrator,

out of sight of everyone else

to approach one of the letters but not the other.

Each letter has the reward

of egg crumbs buried in the sand next to it.

With an alternative choice of water if they want it.

The demonstrator is taught to go

to the letter Y to find his treat.

What Alex found was that when

other untrained meerkats first arrived,

they ignored their own natural instincts

to dig up food where they could smell it.

Instead, they followed the lead of the first meerkat

towards the letter Y,

establishing a new tradition by social learning.

Just like a fad for a new nightclub or restaurant,

the letter Y soon becomes THE place to be.

It's the worst drought of the decade,

and the Kung Fu are in the middle of it.

Almost no rain for 12 months.

Pups Squirt and Weeny are nearly three months old.

In the parched earth, there's little food to dig for.

The family are growing thin.

Strong winds sweep across the stricken land.

As they surge over the Kalahari, they whip up huge dust storms.

The Kung Fu are nervous.

They are disorientated

and lose touch with each other.

The storm sends them fleeing in all directions.

The storm finally passes.

But in the chaos, the group have become split up.

They are desperate to find each other.

Eventually, Klinky comes across one of her pups.

It's Squirt.

But his brother Weeny is missing.

Klinky spots another group.

Are they rivals?

She doesn't quite know whether

to lead her diminished family into battle or to flee.

But as they come closer,

they recognise each other.

It's the rest of their family.

Squirt and Weeny are reunited.

The Kung Fu have survived the worst drought for ten years.

Squirt and Weeny are learning how to look after themselves...

..and Klinky has all her family around her.

As they rest at sunset,

they are through the worst.

The pups are now successfully through their most vulnerable stage.

And together again as a big group,

they are better placed than most

to survive whatever challenges are set to come their way.

HE HUMS

Today, millions of people know and love these meerkats.

HE HUMS

Just me...

HE HUMS

But their superstar status only came about because of the patience

and perseverance of Tim and his team.

Every time I come back to the Kalahari after a time away,

it always strikes me as a magical experience

to be accepted into the middle of a group of animals like this

so that you can watch them going about their normal behaviour,

their natural lives.

And at this distance,

you can see things going on

that you'd never see if you were sitting 100 metres away.

During the past two decades, their observations have led us

to understand some remarkable truths about meerkats.

Not just how they cooperate,

but the personality of each individual member.

In this harsh and challenging environment,

individuals cannot make it on their own.

For meerkats, finding enough to eat and raising pups

is the work of many.

And because meerkats mate for life,

their helpers are their own children.

The kids are helping to raise their full brothers and sisters.

It makes sense for families to stick together and to cooperate.

Because in the harsh Kalahari,

it's cooperate or die.

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