Animals With Cameras: BBC One documentary shows meerkats' hidden depths
BBC The meerkat cameraman
A single one of these highly social, miniature mongooses makes a perfect 20oz snack for a marauding martial eagle or ravenous cape cobra. Tiny teeth and claws adapted for digging are hardly a defence against powerful predators. Instead, meerkats have evolved far more effective tactics to avoid being eaten: team play. Altruism is rare in nature and yet the self-sacrificing, social cohesion of meerkat families means they survive against the odds, using sentries to detect overhead threats and forming sneering, spitting rabbles to drive away terrestrial interlopers.
It was mind-blowing. They are very social animals Gordon Buchanan
They are one African creature enjoying the conservation status of Least Concern in the struggle against extinction. Team play requires practice and, for meerkats, it begins almost the moment they are born into their matriarchal societies, led by a dominant alpha female and with a subordinate cast list of beta animals, lookouts and babysitters. Much of our understanding of meerkats comes from the Kalahari Research Centre in South Africa, where Cambridge University’s Professor Tim Clutton-Brock organised funding to buy the 8,000 acres of land in 2000, establishing one of the most famous living laboratories on the planet. Scientists have unprecedented insights into meerkat sociology provided by up-close and personal studies at this desert haven, yet some of the most remarkable discoveries are those filmed at the centre for the BBC’s Animals With Cameras.
BBC Gordon Buchanan shows the meerkat camera crew the specially-designed cameras
By fitting two wild meerkats with miniature lenses researchers have gained historic access into their subterranean world. What they reveal is a eureka moment in our understanding of these far from simplistic creatures. Deep below ground in a 100-yard labyrinth of excavated tunnels, meerkats are seen to be as gregarious as above ground. I caught up with presenter and cameraman Gordon Buchanan last week as his three-part series was receiving critical acclaim and with him purring louder than a sentinel meerkat over the unprecedented scenes relayed back to the surface by his four-legged film crew. “It was mind-blowing,” he says.
BBC The meerkats are highly social, miniature mongooses