Can I eat the scorpion now mom?
A paper in this week's Science, and in fact the current banner headline story on the Science website (likely to change in a day or two), concerns the behavior of meerkats.Perhaps surprisingly there is little evidence for teaching in nonhuman animals. In this study, by researchers at the University of Cambridge in England, adult meerkats in the Kalahari were shown to teach their pups how to deal with scorpions and other prey.
After all if part of your diet consists of deadly scorpions and you are born clueless it might be a good idea to get some pointers from an experienced relative. Meerkats are social animals that live in groups of around forty. Some of the teaching is carried out not by the parents but by helpers. These helpers are likely to be closely related to the pups they are teaching so this is a nice example of kin selection at work. There is a good summary of the research at the National Geographic website.
Labels: Ecology, Research Reports
posted by John Latto @ 8:51 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Quite shocking... animals being able to teach their young. One of these days they will correspond among themselves to exploit the prideful humans. What if dogs can teach their puppies to look cute and act loveable so they are insured decades of free, palatable food and companionship? Natural Selection will then favor those loveable creatures! Then humans are the ones being manipulated and taken advantaged of as "pets." ....Oh, wait a minute...
Oops, sorry I meant to say Artificial Selection and not Natural Selection... an evil erratum
Hmm...I don't think it's that shocking...young animals learn from their parents' examples all the time, or else they wouldn't be able to survive by themselves! This doesn't necessarily mean they are developing the higher level cognitive abilities to deliberately plot against humans- they are just doing what is best for the survival and success of their species.
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