Captive meerkats don't put as much effort into social niceties

摘要

MEERKATS in zoos fight over food more aggressively, are pickier about which of their peers they groom and have less stable relationships than those living in the wild.This may be due to living such a comfortable life, free of predators and with food and housing reliably available without having to work together for it, says Xareni Pacheco at the Autonomous University of Mexico State. "In a confined space, where conditions rarely change and are fairly predictable, individuals may freely adjust their social dynamics with the group members at any moment, without losing benefits like food, reproductive mates or predation protection," she says.Pacheco built her study of meerkats on the decade-long work of her colleague Joah Madden at the University of Exeter, UK. Madden's team observed the social interactions of more than 100 wild meerkats living in eight groups in South Africa. It was a "unique opportunity" for studying non-primates in the wild, because the groups had become habituated to humans and let the researchers study them up-close and in detail, he says. He and his colleagues used this information to develop a behaviour checklist specifically for studying meerkat social networks.