MEERKATS have proved that they are not just amuging faces but are sufficiently intellectual to school their young.

Young animals learn from their parents but scientists are divided over the extent to which adults actively teach their offspring. Until now no wild animals have been shown to make efforts to teach their young; it has always been assume that the young will pick it up as they go along. But a study published in the journal Science shows that meerkats, like human beings, teach their own and relatives’ young.

“Wild meerkats school their young,” the researchers from the University of Cambridge concluded after observing meerkats in Africa. The animals live in groups up to 40 in arid areas of southern Africa and co-operate in rearing their pups. The dominant pair in a pack produce more than 80 per cent of the young.

Rather than simply eating prey in front of their pups, the means by which the young of other species are thought to learn, meerkats make a point of showing them what is edible and what is dangerous. Older meerkats in the pack, not just the parents, seek out pups to introduce them to food, starting with dead insects and grubs, then injured victims and finally fully mobile prey.

Adults oversee the pups’ attempts to overcome and eat prey and will intervene to encourage them to be more adventurous, the study found. “After a helper gave a pup a food item it normally remained with the pup and monitored its handling of the prey,” the research team said in their report.

“If pups did not attempt to handle a prey item helpers sometimes nudged the item repeatedly with their nose or paws. After nudging occurred, pups normally consumed the prey successfully.” As the pups grow older and become more capable of handling prey, the older meerkats pass over prey that is more difficult to handle, much in the way human teachers make lessons more difficult as a child grows more accomplished.

The researchers concluded: “The results of this study provide strong evidence that the provisioning behaviour of meerkat helpers constitutes a form of ‘opportunity teaching’ in which teachers provide pupils with opportunities to practise skills, thus facilitating learning.

“Teaching is thought to allow faster and more efficient information transfer than passive forms of social learning.”

Alex Thornton, who carried out the research with Katherine McAuliffe at the Kuruman River Reserve in South Africa, said: “A greater understanding of the evolution of teaching is essential if we are to further our knowledge of human cultural evolution and for us to examine the relations between culture in our own species and cultural behaviour in other animals.”

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