Meerkat Manor Blog : Animal Planet: A Conversation With Professor Tim Clutton-Brock: Part II

Check out the second part of our interview, including questions from fans!

You’ve actually studied the social behaviors of several other types of species, including insects, fish, birds and mammals, such as red deer and wild sheep – which one has been your favorite to work with, and why?

I’ve spent my life trying to work with systems where it’s possible to recognize large numbers of individuals and follow them throughout their lives. The reason for that is that if you can trace individuals through their lives, you can answer all sorts of questions about them, which you otherwise can’t get at if you don’t know what age they are, how they’re related to other individuals, whether or not they bred last year, what age they started breeding, and so on. You need too know the details of their individual life histories to be able to answer many important questions about the behavior of animals and their emotions.

Now, that constrains you to working on animals that you can see. It’s very difficult to work on animals who are nocturnal, for example, or who spend their lives underground, or who live in the canopies of tropical forest, or spend most of their lives at seas. The beauty of meerkats is that they live in a very open environment, yet are extremely tame, so instead of watching them from 100 meters away, you can watch them from five meters away. They’re relatively easy to deal with – for example, there would be obvious problems working with lions or hyenas that might turn on you and eat you. Meerkats have unique advantages, and I can’t think of another mammal that has the same kind, so I think meerkats are probably my favorite.

How scientifically accurate is the Meerkat Manor series?

I think it gives a very realistic picture of meerkat life. None of the things (the show) describes don’t happen, and the specific events in almost all cases happened as it described.

But I think what goes on (and) what they film is what they see. They don’t script the thing before and then go to shoot it. They allow the animals’ activities to generate the stories, and then they structure the program to follow the events that they’ve seen. So I think it’s very close to scientific accuracy.

Can you tell us about the kind of attention you've been receiving with the success of Meerkat Manor?

We’ve been receiving a lot of interest through radio programs and people phoning in. There’s also a Web site, so there’s a lot of interest in that; people ask questions – that’s really just a small component of my life. My work focuses on the science; I work with colleagues on fundamental questions about the biology of meerkats. And the publicity and television side is fairly peripheral to that. There’s a lot of interest, but it doesn’t really impact my life very much.

Has it surprised you that fans of Meerkat Manor want to know everything about the life histories, family trees and obscure little details of all the meerkats, even the ones not in the show?

I think I was initially surprised at the success of the show, because when it started I thought people might well become bored after seeing a few of the programs and that it would be difficult for the program makers to hold people’s interest through the first 13-part series. Now, we’ve had four 13–part series and the interest in still ongoing.

I think the interest is very much in following the lives of individuals. Given that, it doesn’t surprise me that people want to know just what individuals are doing and what’s happened to them.

It has been suggested that some sort of meerkat undercrossing be constructed beneath the so-called "road of death," the well-traveled road near the research site. Is that being considered?

No, I don’t think so, because the meerkats can walk through the adjoining the roads at any time. So even if we did put something like that in, I think they’d very seldom use it. I don’t think there would be much point.

Are there any unusual or yet-to-be revealed meerkat habits you can tell us about, perhaps things that haven’t been as apparent in the show but yet are still very much a part of their culture?

I think there are areas we don’t get into very much; there’s a limitation for how much we can film underground for example. We (also) haven’t shown individuals that were substantially affected by TB, but I think the program actually gives a very good impression of how meerkats spend their time and what they do. It follows the lives of real individuals and tells their real stories; it’s really very close to reality.

Tell us a little bit about your book, Meerkat Manor: Flower of the Kalahari.

With the advent of the film, which follows the history of Flower, I thought it would be interesting to put together the details of Flower’s life that the film couldn’t do fully like we could do in the book. I thought by telling the history of Flower, from her birth through her death, through her many breeding attempts and the trials and tribulations of her life, I could help people understand what it’s like being a meerkat. While the book tells the history of Flower, it also tries to give people an introduction to animal societies and why animals behave the way that they do.

Now that meerkats have gone from the small screen to the big screen, what's next? What do they have in their future?

I don’t know – the filming side is outside my control, but I think one of the things the filmmakers are interested in doing is the possibility of telling more about the research side, (perhaps) a series of programs focusing on our interactions with the meerkats and what it’s like to work with them. I also know that a lot of people have been interested in doing the same sort of thing with other species – baboons, lions, elephants or hyenas – (so) we can see what comes of that. I think it would be difficult to produce programs with other species; meerkats are actually rather unusually ideal for something like that.

Does your family play a part in the Meerkat Project? Do they get involved?

My wife has worked with me throughout. She was originally a zoologist and is now a wildlife artist. We did all the early work together, so her insights played a major role in structuring the research. She now does pictures and produces a number of (meerkat) designs that people are using on T-shirts and such, and did the pictures inside (my) book. My children – I’ve got a daughter of 7 and a son of 25 – have also come and helped out at various times.

What’s your ultimate goal for the Meerkat Project?

I don’t think I have one ultimate goal. In practice, scientists like me work toward goals that normally (reset) about every three years, because that’s the duration of the funding we get – so we identify what’s the next question we’re going to ask, and we work towards that.

I can tell you what the next question hopefully will be: we’re currently working on aspects of communication between pups and helpers, and we’re particularly interested in how pups signal their level of hunger and how this affects the frequency with which the helpers feed them. Also, we’re interested in the factors determining how meerkat populations increase and decline. Those are the next two strands of meerkat life we’ll be looking at it in detail, but I don’t have a long-term goal. I look rather at the meerkat groups as a wonderful facility for asking questions about animal behavior, and we’ll keep asking questions in turn for quite a few years to come, I think.