Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 76, Issue 4, October 2008, Pages 1411-1421
Animal Behaviour

Social learning about novel foods in young meerkats

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2008.07.007Get rights and content

Animals are often neophobic towards novel foods, but will incorporate them into their diet after interacting with experienced conspecifics. Such social learning is likely to be particularly important for young animals, for which most foods are unfamiliar. It has been suggested that in some species adults actively promote learning about unfamiliar foods by teaching offspring, although firm evidence is lacking. I examined social influences on learning about novel foods among wild meerkats, Suricata suricatta, a species where older group members teach pups prey-handling skills. In two experiments, naïve pups were significantly more likely to eat hardboiled egg, a food item not normally present in the diet, and scorpions, a common prey type, if they had interacted with experienced conspecifics. I then investigated whether helpers teach pups to eat unfamiliar prey by preferentially feeding rare items and through direct feeding, where food items are transferred mouth to mouth. Rare prey items were fed more frequently than common items, although this may reflect nutritional characteristics. Direct feeding was most commonly used by juvenile helpers, which typically contribute relatively little to cooperative activities, and was more frequent if other helpers were nearby. This suggests that direct feeding may be a means of reducing the costs of feeding by improving the efficiency of energy transfer and minimizing the risks of kleptoparasitism. I conclude that learning about novel foods is likely to occur as a by-product of provisioning by helpers. There was little evidence that helpers actively teach pups what to eat.

Section snippets

Study Site and Population

Data were collected from December 2003 to April 2006 on meerkats in 13 groups of 6–41 individuals living in xeric savannah along the dry Kuruman River in the South African Kalahari (Clutton-Brock et al. 1998). The study was carried out with ethics approval from the University of Cambridge and the University of Pretoria, under a permit issued by the Northern Cape Conservation Authority, South Africa. Groups were located by radiotracking one radiocollared animal within each group. All work

Experiment 1: egg learning

None of the 61 pups tested ate egg the first time they were presented with it, but during the ‘helper’ treatment that followed, 30 pups ate egg once the helper began eating. In contrast, none of eight pups whose first exposure was followed by another exposure alone ate egg during either the first or second exposure. The presence of experienced helpers on the second exposure therefore significantly increased the probability that pups would eat egg (permutation test on pups whose second exposure

Discussion

Theoretical and empirical work suggests that social learning can allow individuals to acquire information of critical fitness value, reducing the need for costly asocial learning (Galef, 1995, Giraldeau and Caraco, 2000). Young animals may benefit from showing neophobia towards unfamiliar foods, particularly if potentially toxic items are present in the environment, and incorporating novel foods into their diet only after encountering them in the context of interactions with adults (Galef 1993

Acknowledgments

I thank Mr and Mrs H. Kotze for permission to work on their land. I am grateful for the support of the Mammal Research Institute at the University of Pretoria and for the help of T. Flower, N. Jordan, K. McAuliffe and N. Tayar. I thank T. Clutton-Brock for advice and access to the meerkats and M. Manser for technical support and discussion. D. Lukas and K. Moyes provided statistical advice and R. Almond, M. Bell, S. English, S. Hodge, N. Jordan, K. Laland, K. McAuliffe, N. Raihani and two

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