Tradition explains why some meerkats are late risers
(糖心视频Org.com) -- Just as afternoon tea is traditional in England but not in France, different groups of meerkats have different ways of doing things, Cambridge zoologists have found.
After studying meerkats in the Kalahari for the past 10 years, Dr Alex Thornton and colleagues from the Department of聽Zoology found that some groups of meerkats always got up later out of their sleeping burrows than their neighbours.
These differences appear to have been maintained as local traditions, with patterns of behaviour in different groups being聽spread by learning from others.
Studying social traditions among animals in the wild is difficult because it is hard to prove that differences in聽behaviour are due to the social spread of information rather than genetics or environmental factors.
This is the first time such traditional patterns of daily activity have been observed in animals outside the laboratory,聽and the study is published this week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
According to lead author Dr Thornton: "Studies of animal traditions are essential for understanding the biological origins聽of human culture."
"Because most previous studies examined groups of animals separated by large distances it has been extremely difficult to聽work out whether behavioural differences between groups really are traditions, or whether they might be better explained by聽genetic differences or differences in the local ecology."
Dr Thornton's study site in the Kalahari Desert is shared by fifteen meerkat groups with overlapping territories, and聽group differences in getting-up time could not be explained by differences in ecological conditions.
And as male meerkats always breed outside the group that they were born into, genes get shuffled between groups, so聽genetic factors are unlikely to account for group differences.
"We found that new immigrants adopted the behaviour of their new groups and that differences between groups were聽maintained despite groups changing in size and structure as old members died and new ones were born," says Dr Thornton.
"So it seems that, like afternoon tea or an ap茅ritif before dinner, meerkat getting-up times are local traditions passed聽down through the generations."
Provided by University of Cambridge