Squirrel-sized meerkats are mongooses famed for their upright posture. They often stand on their rear legs and gaze alertly over the southern African plains where they live. Mothers can even nurse their young while standing. Meerkats also called suricates work together in numbers. A few will typically serve as lookouts, watching the skies for birds of prey, such as hawks and eagles, that can snatch them from the ground. A sharp, shrill call is the signal for all to take cover.
While a few individuals guard the group, the rest busy themselves foraging for the foods that make up their varied diet. Meerkats will eat insects, lizards, birds, and fruit.
When hunting small game, they work together and communicate with purring sounds. Meerkats are good hunters and are sometimes tamed for use as rodent-catchers. Meerkat groups utilize several different burrows and move from one to another. Each burrow is an extensive tunnel-and-room system that remains cool even under the broiling African sun. Females give birth to two to four young each year in one of the group's burrows. Fathers and siblings help to raise meerkat young, teaching them to play and forage and alerting them to the ever present danger from above.
Young meerkats are so fearful of predatory birds that even airplanes will send them diving for cover. All rights reserved. Common Name: Meerkat. Scientific Name: Suricata suricatta. Meerkats are known for their upright stance.
Mothers can even feed their young while standing up. They have strong foreclaws, which help them dig. They also have a pointed snout, which enables them to excavate prey from narrow trenches. Meerkats are carnivores. Their diet consists mostly of insects. They dig in the ground to find their prey of insects, as well as siders, snails, rodents, eggs, lizards and scorpions.
They use their keen sense of smell and quick digging skills to capture their prey. They have a home territory of about 4 square miles or more and hunt in a different section each day, returning to the first area after a week. While each meerkat must find its own food, they may work together to capture larger prey, such as a large lizard. Meerkats live in the desert. Meerkats have certain traits that help them to dig, such as a special membrane that can cover their eyes while burrowing.
Their ears can also close while they dig. Meerkats can be found throughout southern Africa, including Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
Female meerkats have a gestation of ten weeks. A female can give birth from 1 to 8 babies, called pups, at a time, usually 3 to 4. She can have several litters in one year. She typically gives birth during the rainy season, when there is plenty of food, between November and March. In defensive threats and mobbing, meerkats appear larger than they actually are.
An individual will arch its back, standing as tall as possible on all four legs, with hair and tail erect, and its head lowered. At the same time, it will rock back and forth, growl, hiss, and spit in an attempt to intimidate its enemy.
Mobbing requires a group of meerkats all giving defensive threats at the same time. If a predator approaches in spite of these bluffs, a meerkat will lie on its back with teeth and claws fully visible, protecting the back of its neck. For aerial predators, meerkats will most often flee to a burrow if an attack seems forthcoming.
If surprised, however, adults will cover their offspring with their own bodies Estes, Meerkats are an important link in the food web. They provide food for predators. They also take many invertebrates, probably acting as a control on their own prey populations.
Meerkats may slow the increase of agricultural pest populations, in particularly Lepidopterans. In addition, meerkats adapt well to captive settings and are a popular zoo exhibit animal van Staaden, Meerkats are significant carriers of rabies. However, there have only been 10 documented instances of rabies-infected meerkats attacking people or domestic animals in the past ten years.
They are also a carrier of tick-borne diseases van Staaden, This label is probably correlated with the ecological effects of their burrow construction and being carriers of disease van Staaden, Meerkats are also known as Suricates or slender-tailed mongooses. The Honolulu Zoo houses only male meerkats. This is to ensure no possibility of an escaped group to establish a breeding population. If this were to occur, they could seriously damage the natural ecosystem Honolulu Zoo, In birds, naked and helpless after hatching.
Animals with bilateral symmetry have dorsal and ventral sides, as well as anterior and posterior ends. Synapomorphy of the Bilateria. More specifically refers to a group of organisms in which members act as specialized subunits a continuous, modular society - as in clonal organisms. Vegetation is typically sparse, though spectacular blooms may occur following rain.
Deserts can be cold or warm and daily temperates typically fluctuate. In dune areas vegetation is also sparse and conditions are dry. This is because sand does not hold water well so little is available to plants.
In dunes near seas and oceans this is compounded by the influence of salt in the air and soil. Salt limits the ability of plants to take up water through their roots.
Endothermy is a synapomorphy of the Mammalia, although it may have arisen in a now extinct synapsid ancestor; the fossil record does not distinguish these possibilities. Convergent in birds. Iteroparous animals must, by definition, survive over multiple seasons or periodic condition changes. Clutton-Brock, T. African Journal of Ecology, , 37 1 : Estes, R. The behavior guide to African mammals.
Berkeley: University of California Press. Honolulu Zoo, Date unknown. Manser, M. Royal Society of London. Biological Sciences, , Nowak, R. Walker's Mammals of the World, Sixth Edition.
Oakland Zoo, Date Unknown. Suricata suricata. Mammalian Species , To cite this page: Fuehrer, T. Disclaimer: The Animal Diversity Web is an educational resource written largely by and for college students.
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