Meerkat Facts

A meerkat is slender and light — 10 to 14 inches in the body, only 1.5 to 2.5 pounds — with a grizzled silvery-brown coat and dark bands that break up its outline against the scrub. Its toolkit is all about digging and watching. Long, non-retractable foreclaws, nearly an inch, dig burrows and unearth buried prey; dark patches around the eyes cut the desert glare like an athlete's eye-black, sharpening its view of the sky for raptors; and its ears fold shut to keep sand out while digging. The muscular tail is not for gripping but for balance — a third leg, or tripod, that props the animal up when it stands erect for long stretches on watch.

Meerkats are endemic to arid southern Africa — the Kalahari and Namib and surrounds, across Botswana, Namibia, southwestern Angola, and western South Africa. They stick to open, stony savanna, dry scrub, and true desert, and avoid woodland or tall grass that would block the sightlines their vigilance depends on. The heart of their home is an extensive burrow system, deep enough to stay cool through 100°F days and warm through freezing nights, with a mob's territory spanning several square miles of interconnected networks.

Meerkats have fast metabolisms and eat a varied, mostly insect diet — beetles, termites, grubs, spiders, centipedes, small lizards and snakes, eggs, roots — foraging as a spread-out group that stays within earshot. They sniff out prey buried in the sand and dig it up. Most striking is how they handle scorpions: meerkats have some innate immunity to scorpion venom, but they still take no chances, snapping off the stinger and rubbing the scorpion vigorously in the sand to scrub off venom before eating it. With almost no standing water for much of the year, they get their moisture from prey and moisture-rich roots.

Meerkat society is complex, strictly matriarchal, and built around watching each other's backs. A mob of 20 to 30 (sometimes 50) is led by a dominant alpha female who suppresses breeding by other females. The signature behaviour is the sentry system: while the group forages face-down, one or two meerkats take a high vantage point and scan sky and ground continuously, keeping up a low "peep" to signal all-clear. They use over 30 distinct calls, including different alarms for terrestrial predators (bunch together) and aerial ones (sprint for a bolt-hole) — the meaning depends on both the type of threat and its urgency.

Breeding is dominated by the alpha female, who after about 11 weeks bears a litter of 2 to 5 blind pups in a nursery chamber. Because she must return to foraging to keep her milk flowing, pup care falls to the mob: subordinate females (some of which lactate spontaneously) and subordinate males stay behind as babysitters, warming and guarding the young. Once pups join the foraging party at about a month old, adults actively teach them — bringing a disabled scorpion, for instance — so they learn to handle dangerous food safely. Wild meerkats live 8 to 12 years, with high first-year mortality from predators, drought, and territorial fights.

The meerkat is Least Concern and locally common, helped by a high reproductive rate and a harsh desert habitat that discourages heavy human development. It is not pressure-free, though: prolonged droughts crash the insect populations they depend on, and because mobs live packed together, infectious diseases — bovine tuberculosis picked up from cattle pastureland, and rabies — can sweep through and wipe out a whole gang. Overall, the population remains stable.

• San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance: Meerkat Profile
• Kalahari Meerkat Project (University of Cambridge)
• IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: Suricata suricatta
• National Geographic: Meerkat Facts