Innovative problem solving in wild meerkats

doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.03.018

Animal Behaviour

Volume 83, Issue 6, June 2012, Pages 1459-1468

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.03.018 Get rights and content

Behavioural innovations may have far-reaching evolutionary and ecological consequences, allowing individuals to obtain new resources and cope with environmental change. However, as innovations are rarely observed in nature, their emergence is poorly understood. What drives individuals to innovate, and what psychological mechanisms allow them to do so? We used three novel food extraction tasks to address these questions in groups of wild meerkats, Suricata suricatta. Innovatory tendencies were unrelated to body condition and foraging success, but were affected by age, rank and sex. Juvenile individuals were most likely to interact with tasks, but seldom solved them, perhaps owing to their small size or lack of dexterity. Instead, adult subordinates made up the bulk of the innovators. In cooperatively breeding societies, the inability of subordinate helpers to compete physically with dominant breeders may drive them to seek out solutions to novel problems. Most innovators were males, which, as the dispersing sex, may be particularly prone to solve novel problems, and innovators virtually always persisted longer than other group members when interacting with tasks. Most successful individuals solved tasks more than once, and learned to inhibit ineffective prepotent responses across successive presentations of the same task. They did not learn to manipulate functional parts of the apparatus more efficiently, however, nor did they extract general rules allowing them to solve novel tasks faster. Contrary to recent suggestions that innovation may be cognitively demanding, these results suggest that simple, conserved learning processes and dogged perseverance may suffice to generate solutions to novel problems.

Highlights

► We tested innovative problem solving in wild meerkats with three novel foraging tasks. ► Juveniles were most likely to interact with tasks but were rarely successful. ► Subordinate adults were most likely to solve tasks. ► Solvers learned to inhibit ineffective responses but did not generalise across tasks. ► Persistence and simple learning processes may suffice to generate innovations.

Section snippets

Study Population

We tested seven groups of 14–24 habituated meerkats at the Kuruman River Reserve in South Africa between January and May 2009. Individuals were classified as pups (<3 months), juveniles (3–6 months), subadults (6–12 months) or adults (more than 12 months; Brotherton et al. 2001). Adults were divided into dominants and subordinates. The dominant male and female in each meerkat group can be unambiguously identified because they show rates of aggression an order of magnitude higher than other

Interacting with and Solving Tasks

Individuals of different ages varied in their likelihood of interacting with and solving tasks. Juveniles were particularly likely to approach and touch the apparatus (Table A1 in the Appendix), but were seldom successful in obtaining rewards (only one of 26 juveniles that made contact with the apparatus ever obtained a scorpion; Fig. 2a). Among the 63 meerkats (of a total of 135) that interacted with the apparatus, subordinate adults were most successful (Fig. 2a, Table A2). Most (10/13)

Discussion

Our results suggest that certain categories of individuals and indeed certain specific individuals may often be responsible for introducing new foraging behaviours into meerkat groups. While juveniles often interacted with novel tasks, they were seldom successful, perhaps owing to their relatively small size or lack of dexterity. This parallels findings from work on callitrichid monkeys (Kendal et al. 2005), and suggests that explorative tendencies or neophilia alone do not suffice for

Acknowledgments

We thank the Kotze family and Northern Cape Conservation for permission to work in the Kalahari, Tim Clutton-Brock and Marta Manser for logistical support and access to the meerkats and everyone at the Kalahari Meerkat Project for their help. Neeltje Boogert and Sinead English provided valuable comments on the manuscript. A.T. was funded by Pembroke College, Cambridge and a BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship.

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View full text

Innovative problem solving in wild meerkats

Highlights

Section snippets

Study Population

Interacting with and Solving Tasks

Discussion

Acknowledgments

Animal Behaviour

Behavioural Processes

Animal Behaviour

Animal Behaviour

Animal Behaviour

Animal Behaviour

Behavioural Processes

Animal Behaviour

Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Animal Behaviour

Animal Behaviour

Animal Behaviour

Inter-individual and age differences in exploration, neophobia and problem-solving ability in a Neotropical raptor (Milvago chimango)

Animal Cognition

Cultural innovation and transmission of tool use in wild chimpanzees: evidence from field experiments

Animal Cognition

Social learning and innovation are positively correlated in pigeons (Columba livia)

Animal Cognition

Offspring food allocation by parents and helpers in a cooperative mammal

Behavioral Ecology

Costs of cooperative behaviour in suricates (Suricata suricatta)

Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Intrasexual competition and sexual selection in cooperative mammals

Nature

Personality and problem-solving performance explain competitive ability in the wild

Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Statistical Computing

The behavioural ecology of personality: consistent individual differences from an adaptive perspective

Ecology Letters

Limited spread of innovation in a wild parrot, the kea (Nestor notabilis)

Animal Cognition

Radiocollars do not affect the survival or foraging behaviour of wild meerkats

Journal of Zoology