EDUCATING EATERS

In what could be the most shocking revelation since Boy George came out of the closet, an interesting paper in the latest issue of the journal Science describes teaching behavior among Slender-tailed Meerkats (Suricata suricatta). The Afrikaans name “Meerkat” is used for three monotypic genera of South African mongooses, so in this post I'll use instead the name “Suricate,” which is attached only to Suricata, the subject of the paper, and the most social of the three. It is found throughout the southern quarter of Africa, and lives in colonies of as many as fifty individuals. I should have a Suricate painting for you, and it shames me to have never even painted a member of their fantastic family. The Asian marten I'm forced to illustrate this post with is a sorry stand-in. Anyway, according to the paper, Suricate colonies are dominated by a single pair that is responsible for more than 80% of the group's reproduction. This was a bit of a letdown for me to read, since I had been under the impression they comprised two or three cooperating pairs and their offspring, a kind of social structure that is far less common. Suricate groups occupy small territories centered around the communal burrow, and individuals rarely stray outside the area. Their diet consists mostly of arthropods, but they also eat eggs and small vertebrate prey. The authors of the Science paper, Thornton and McAuliffe, report that at about one month of age, pups begin to join older animals on foraging sorties, where they are typically presented with killed prey items. As the pups become more experienced, these are replaced by live and incrementally less disabled prey (the interesting example of a scorpion with a bitten-off stinger was cited) and finally by fully functioning quarry. The authors assert that this behavior falls within the definition of teaching put forth by Caro and Hauser: "(i.) an individual, A, modifies its behaviour only in the presence of a naïve observer, B; (ii) A incurs some cost or derives no immediate benefit; and (iii) as a result of A's behaviour, B acquires knowledge or skills more rapidly or efficiently than it would otherwise, or that it would not have learned at all." Of course it is difficult to interpret what motivates the older animals to mangle prey items a bit less as the pups' education develops. Do they make judgments based on actual assessments of the pups' skills? Hard to say. The evolutionary benefit to the teachers is more clear when coupled with the information that the colony consists essentially of a single family.

The paper presents a nice set of observations on Suricate behavior, but despite press accounts to the contrary, it offers little new information about animal behavior in general. Rather, it represents another step in our shifting interpretation of animal behavior. When I was in college, in the late 1970s, the cardinal ethological sin was anthropomorphism. Although their vehemence may have been in part a policy meant to dissuade undergraduates who were too eager to go overboard in that direction, my professors were uniformly intolerant of any comparisons between the motivations of humans and non-humans. I saw it then (and still do) as a carry-over of our unfortunate tendency to separate ourselves from the rest of nature. The very idea of the word “nature,” meaning all that is not human, is kind of twisted, but that line we draw affects everything we do, from our daily personal routines to our national wildlife management policies. In the past couple of decades, though, the ethologists have come a long way, and today, many of them are all too happy to see instincts and emotions as the same thing. The behavior that Thornton and McAuliffe described is not anomalous in the least. It's receiving attention because they made a strong case for calling it what it is: education. Anyone who's had a litter of kittens raised in their home, or who's spent a lot of time in a blind on a raptor's nest has seen similar teaching behavior. So important is hunting education to falcons (Falco spp.), that without it a hungry young bird will simply look at a pigeon and scream to be fed. Falconers understood this centuries ago, and developed a routine called “entering,” that mimics the education provided by a parent falcon.

It's often surprising how different percption can be in two closely related species, so we should expect our own perceptions to differ from those of other vertebrates. Still, our behavior is guided by the same principles as the other members of our phylum. Our actions are largely influenced by emotions like love, joy, anger, guilt, envy and sorrow. These motivations are not the province of our species alone, nor, does it seem, is education.
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upper: YELLOW-THROATED MARTEN & MALAYSIAN PEACOCK PHEASANT (1994) acrylic 10" x 8"
lower: SMOKE JUMPER--APLOMADO FALCON (1994) acrylic 19" x 30"