Meerkat pup's first scorpion
Photo credit: National Geography
Developing survival skills such as the ability to hunt prey successfully and to locate food and water source are incredibly crucial for wild animals. Teaching can allow faster skills acquisition and more efficient information transfer compared to passive learning. Wild animals such as meerkat was shown to provide teaching to younger family members to assist learning on how to handle prey items.
There are three criteria for teaching (developed by Caro and Hauser):
i) As a result of teaching, students obtain knowledge or develop certain skills faster.
ii) The teacher modifies its behaviour when students are around.
iii) There may be some cost involved, but no immediate benefit will be acquired by the teacher.
Meerkat's diet comprised of a range vertebrate and invertebrate prey, which requires skills to handle. Teaching was shown to play an important role in enhancing the ability of younger meerkats to handle dangerous prey items such as scorpions (one of the usual prey items for the meerkats).
Alex Thornton and Katherine McAuliffe from University of Cambridge discovered that older meerkats teach pups (less than 3 month old meerkats) directly on how to handle scorpions.
Initially, older meerkats will disable the prey by removing the sting or bring dead scorpions to the pups. Gradually, as the pups age, the adult meerkats will increasingly introduce live preys to pups. By doing so, the older meerkats are training the pups by providing them with the opportunities to handle live preys. The finding shows that the likelihood of pups to lose live prey items and the duration they handle scorpions decreases as they age. Hence, the result shows that the teaching is effective in developing prey-handling skills in meerkats.
Watch Wild Meerkats video here!
https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/videos/david-attenboroughs-life-story/meerkat-pup-takes-on-first-scorpion-4063.aspx
References:
Thornton, A. and McAuliffe, K. (2006). Teaching in Wild Meerkats. Science. 313, 227-229.
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