- They are small animals in mammalian group.
- The name Meerkat came from a Dutch word, means, “lake cat”.
- Scientific name of Meerkat is Suricata suricatta.
- Meerkats are generally found in the South African region.
- They generally live in groups of 20-30 members and the name of the groups are “Clan”, “Mob”.
- Usual life span of a Meerkat is 12-14 years.
- They are small in size, usually 700-735 grams in weight and 27-40 centimeters.
- They are omnivorous animals; they usually eat insects, fungi, small animals, bird’s eggs.
- Meerkats have very strong immune system and they are immune to scorpion venoms.
- They have very less body fats, due to that they usually prefer foraging. Their foraging usually takes 1 hour to get the proper food resources.
- Baby Meerkat don’t forage unless they become 1 month old. Till then baby Meerkat depends on the mentor who forage for them and feeds them.
- They behave like humans. They usually active during day time and sleep during night time.
- Adult female Meerkat can reproduce and can give birth at a 1-1.5 years range.
- Female Meerkat can give birth up to 4-5 pups per year. They reproduce preferable in warm conditions.
- Several adult Meerkats do babysitting when mother Meerkat busy in forage for her babies.
- They live in ground burrows and they have very strong underground networks. They create several burrows and tend to move in different burrows after certain time intervals.
- Sometime people call them Yellow Mongoose or Ground Squirrel.
- They can create sounds depending on the situation like weather, danger, social call, moving call, recruitment call etc.
If you
don’t have any idea How Meerkats are look like then please see the movie “The
lion King”. In that movie the character called, “Timon” represents a Meerkat.
Even
you can see a lot of Meerkats in the Movie “Life of Pi”, the floating island
habitats.
Now meerkat is not only a tiny, interesting mammal, it is a astrologer too, who predicts the outcome of the FIFA World Cup 2014 matches. A meerkat predicts the outcome of every Dutch match and guess what, till now it guesses right. A meerkat, named, Caz has a job to do before every Dutch match at the Dierenpark zoo in Amersfoort in Central Netherlands. This meerkat has to choose outcome of the match by picking up the flag of the nation. Apparently Caz, is spot on and till now his prediction is absolutely correct. This is another example of animal prediction like Paul, the octopus from Germany.
