Animal matriarchies are no feminist Eden. Often, an unpleasant undercurrent of reproductive tyranny manipulates the fine line between teamwork and exploitation. Nowhere is this so stark as in the collective lives of that loveable TV star, the meerkat (Suricata suricatta), whose violent totalitarian society is somewhat at odds with their saccharine screen image.
I’ll admit, it’s hard not to be charmed by a meerkat. I’m generally immune to conventional cuteness. I tend to gravitate towards strange slimy creatures with other-worldly lives. But when I visited the Kalahari Meerkat Project in South Africa a few years ago, I was completely won over by these small social mongooses. They’re such manic comic characters. And their penchant for standing on their back legs makes anthropomorphizing an easy crime. Their default setting is to dig, which they do with great fury the moment they stop moving, generally to little or no avail. Scrapping over monster scorpions and toppling over whilst nodding off in the sun are further staples of a well-honed clowning repertoire. Behind the slapstick, however, meerkat society owes more to Stalin than it does to Chaplin.
Meerkats live in clans of three to 50, with a single dominant female monopolizing 80 percent of the breeding. The rest of the mob—her relatives, descendants and a few itinerant males—help out with territorial defense, sentinel duties, burrow maintenance, babysitting, and even suckling the dominant’s pups. This kind of division of labor, where only a few individuals get to breed and the rest of the group helps, is known scientifically as “cooperative breeding.” This term has always struck me as wildly euphemistic. The meerkat’s apparent camaraderie isn’t achieved through cozy cooperation so much as outright tyranny.
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Meerkat society is predicated on ruthless reproductive competition between closely related females who, when pregnant, will readily kill and eat each other’s pups. This baby-eating bonanza is kept in check by the omnipotence of a dominant female with a zero-tolerance policy for breeding subordinates. Her goal is to prevent any of her female relatives reproducing during her reign and rope them into caring for her babies instead. This removes any unwanted competition for her pups and protects them from being eaten. It also allows her to invest all her energy into raising more litters than she could do otherwise. It’s a prize position that’s worth fighting hard and dirty for. As the biggest and most violent meerkat in the mob, she’ll use extortion, physical abuse, entrapment, and murder to achieve this end.
Vacancies for dominance don’t come up often. Generally, the position only becomes available when a matriarch dies, perhaps at the talons of a hawk or a rival meerkat gang. The top job then falls to the oldest and heaviest female in the group, most likely one of the matriarch’s daughters.
From the moment a meerkat inherits her supreme status, her size increases, her testosterone levels rise and her hostility towards all other females will surge. She will demonstrate particular hostility towards those that are closest to her in age and size—most probably her sisters—and who therefore make up her greatest reproductive competition.
“If you are a female meerkat your best bet—your hope in life—is that someone will eat your mother,” Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, Cambridge behavioral ecologist and founder of the Kalahari Meerkat Project, explained to me over the phone in a cut-glass British accent. “And it’s no good if they eat your mother at the wrong time. What you really want is for them to eat your mother when you are the oldest subordinate in the group. Otherwise, one of your bloody sisters gets the job and she throws you out.”
Clutton-Brock has been documenting the savage soap opera of meerkat family life for 25 years. He explained that it’s not just the matriarch’s sisters that get booted out. During the dominant’s reign, any females that have reached sexual maturity, and might entertain the idea of motherhood, will be run out of the group before they can even try.
“You regularly see dominant meerkats evicting their older daughters. They are brutal: if their daughters don’t get the hell out, they kill them. If you look at a meerkat group, there are basically no subordinate females over four years old because the dominant females evict them between the ages of two and four. And so they’re all gone.”
Eviction follows a well-worn program of escalating abuse. Entry-level bullying begins with swiping snacks straight out of subordinates’ mouths. It makes for an amusing vignette on TV, but the truth is darker. Edible life is scarce in the Kalahari. Most creatures that could be eaten by a meerkat have evolved noxious booby traps as protection: scorpions that inject lethal neurotoxins and beetles that shoot boiling acid from their anus at high speed. All require disarming before consumption. First, however, you have to find them. The baked earth of the desert can be as tough as concrete. It took me 10 tough minutes with a pickaxe to experimentally excavate a scorpion after I’d located its den. Meerkats can only cope with quarrying soft sand and may churn through mountains of the stuff before finding something palatable. So having hard-won food stolen isn’t just rude—it’s a critical loss of expensive energy.
Next comes physical abuse: hip-slamming and the casual biting of tails, necks, and genitals are all favored moves by a dominant female looking to exert her power. Corporal bullying serves to impose authority and, as a bonus, the resulting stress could also depress the victim’s fertility. Its main purpose, however, is to make life so unpleasant for the victim that they will leave the group. “Eviction starts with bullying. Bites at the base of tail are common. When you see a meerkat with a raw patch at the base of their tail you know that one is going to be next,” Clutton-Brock explained. Exile may sound like a walk in the park compared to a constant barrage of snack swiping and genital biting. But the only thing more oppressive than a dominant female meerkat is the Kalahari Desert itself. Environments don’t come much less forgiving than this vast semi-arid savannah. Rainfall is a hazy memory for most of the year and temperatures fluctuate by 45 degrees Celsius daily. During the height of summer, the daytime temperature tops 60 degrees Celsius, yet in the winter the nights can be freezing. Without warm bodies to huddle next to in a communal den, a meerkat could easily go to bed and never wake up.
More deadly still is the risk of trespassing on a neighboring meerkat mob’s territory. Each group has a home range of somewhere between two and five square kilometers, which is vigorously patrolled and defended. Due to the scarcity of suitable burrows and food, neighboring groups are in intense competition and often engage in violent fights. According to Clutton-Brock, his study area is one continuous patchwork of warring gangs. So an exiled meerkat cannot avoid entering a rival’s neighborhood. As soon as she’s spotted by the resident mob, they’ll chase her away. If they catch her, she’s dead.
If a rival gang of meerkats doesn’t kill an exiled female, there are dozens of sharp-eyed predators only too eager to turn a lonely meerkat into dinner. The soft sand that meerkats need to forage in is only found along dry riverbeds, grasslands, and dunes with little or no vegetation for cover. That leaves a hungry meerkat highly exposed—out in the wide open, digging away with their head in the sand. Without a sentinel to keep watch and sound the alarm for predators, a solitary meerkat is easy picking for umpteen aerial predators, wild cats, or jackals.
In the event that a developing female meerkat’s hormones override the system, and she has the temerity to get knocked up by a roving male, retaliation is swift and terminal. The pregnant subordinate will be unceremoniously evicted. The ensuing stress generally triggers her to abort. If she manages to go full term without detection and give birth in the den, the matriarch will kill and eat any unwelcome pups—very often her own grandchildren—and banish the female from the group.
If that wasn’t chilling enough, there is an additional “cooperative” twist to the eviction of these recently bereaved daughters. They may be permitted to slink back to the group on one condition: they take up wet-nursing duties for their murderous mother’s babies.
Suckling is a serious drain on a subordinate’s reserves, but these enslaved females have no choice when the alternative is exile and a lonely death. This threat explains the curious altruism of inherently self-motivated individuals. Taking care of the dominant’s pups is a form of punishment or “rent” to be paid for their errant behavior. Given the close relatedness of the females in the group, helping raise their mother’s offspring does at least mean they share a significant part of their genome. This genetic connection strengthens a subordinate’s incentive to sacrifice and offers some hereditary benefit to cooperation. If a subordinate female manages to appease the dominant and remain in the group for long enough, after all, there is always the chance she may one day inherit the title and get to breed herself.
“As a developing female, the last thing you want is for your mother to kick you out of the group. So in a sense, you have to play her game. She is bigger than you and has the capacity to throw you out. So instead you just have to hope someone will eat her,” Clutton-Brock told me.
One thing you won’t see is subordinate females ganging up to overthrow the top bitch. “That’s what a primate would do. Have an alliance and take on the dominant,” Clutton-Brock explained. “Meerkats don’t form alliances. They’re very stupid—they’re certainly not what you’d want to rely on to decide your insurance policy.”
Insurrections only occur if dominance is ambiguous. Say if a weak female inherits the top job, by virtue of being oldest but perhaps not the heaviest. Alternatively, a strong dominant might get sick or injured. The system then breaks down and bloody chaos ensues, as closely matched females make a desperate play for the top. In addition to escalating aggression towards one another, they’ll often all fall pregnant. The result is a baby-eating bloodbath. The first litter born will be eaten by a pregnant female, then the next. This massacre continues until the last litter is born, which will be the only one to survive regardless of who their mother is. In one study of 248 recorded litters, 106 failed to emerge from the den, suggesting their pups were all killed.
Meerkat culture is tense and homicidal. A study investigating lethal violence in more than one thousand different mammals unmasked the meerkat as the most murderous mammal on the planet—beating even humans to the brutal top spot. Every meerkat born has a one in five probability of being killed by another meerkat, most likely a female and quite possibly their own mother.
All of which makes the meerkat an odd choice for wholesome family entertainment or as a trusted purveyor of car insurance. They may be cute and comical and their society labeled “cooperative,” but each individual is nevertheless out for themselves. No god would have created such a flawed and bloodstained system. But evolution did and, somehow, it not only works but is highly successful. Dominant females can manage three to four litters a year, instead of just the one that might be expected for an animal their size. One legendary matriarch, named Mabili, succeeded in birthing 81 pups during a decade-long reign.
Adapted from Bitch: On the Female of the Species by Lucy Cooke. Copyright © 2022. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
