Visit the Friends of the Kalahari Meerkat Project Gallery for pictures of our Kuruman River Reserve study site, the volunteers’ and visitors’ daily life at the project site, portraits of some of our meerkats, and photos depicting typical meerkat behaviour.
This page also features meerkat videos filmed in the Kalahari Meerkat Project. Please click on the links below to watch the videos.
A meerkat’s day
Click here to see the video on youtube.
You’ll see Lazuli getting up and grooming, Moomins youngsters playfighting, Young Ones foraging. The unexperienced Commandos pup “Drew” digs without success, while Lazuli’s “Franny” and Moomins’ “Hemulen” clean and devour their millipedes. It’s then Moomins’ “Grandpa Grumble’s” turn as a sentinel, while the Elveera’s predator alarm is for real.
The afternoon starts quietly with foraging – the Commandos “Ketamine” alone, then the Gattaca helper “Pustola” with pup, then Commandos’ “Mrs. Doyle” who prefers to eat his food to sharing it with pup “Phoebe”. Action starts with Young Ones evicting the subordinate female “Mia Moya”, followed by Whiskers evicting “De La Soul”. In the subsequent Intergroup Interactions you’ll first see the Lazuli closely monitoring Whiskers’ “Yossarian”, and later Whiskers fighting two Lazuli rovers “JD” and “Bobby”. The day ends peacefully with intense grooming sessions of Lazuli and Commandos…
A volunteer’s day
Click here to see the video on youtube.
Experience what the volunteers do in the field: You’ll see how hard it can be to weigh one (and only one) meerkat – featuring the Lazuli, Commandos and Moomins. Moomins’ juvenile female “Frida” is then trying to eat my shoe, until her siblings kidnap her for a little playfighting… Shown next is the application of dye marks at the Lazuli. Most of the day is spent with focals (first a foraging focal, then an ad lib focal monitoring a Lazuli predator alarm). And last but not least my hat is taken for a termite mound – by “Grumpy”, the dominant female of Moomins…