14 DAY TRIAL // "The Lion King" presented to the public the meerkats, a type of South African mangoose, through the character of Timon. But unlike Timon, real meerkats do not keep company to warthogs and do not live solitary but in social groups, up to 30 individuals, with a complex cooperative behavior and a strict hierarchy. But in this rigid society, dominated by alpha males and females, researchers found something inconceivable: lousy subordinate males sexing. With females.
The villains use a clever tactic to transmit their heredity: they sneak off in the night to make sex with females from foreign groups.
"One of the reasons people are drawn to these societies is the apparent cooperation between individuals - subordinate males don't breed in the groups but they help to rear the dominants' young," said Andrew Young at the University of Cambridge, UK.
"But natural selection favors those who maximize their own reproductive success, so it seems paradoxical that these males are helping others."
Young's team investigated for 5 years 15 meerkat groups in an area in the southern Kalahari Desert. The team established through genetic tests the paternity of all pups born during that time. The team noticed that subordinate males regularly visited foreign territories during the estrus time in females. It has been thought that they were just abandoning the maternal group to establish into a new territory, where they could form a group of their own, in which they could be dominant. But DNA analysis revealed that these are just sex trips, and effective ones.
"Such extra-group mating accounts for 70% of the subordinates' offspring, and allows the males to breed without permanently leaving their family group." said Young.
Up to 25 % of the meerkat offspring were the result of these night incursions.
"If the subordinates are able to get more reproductive success in other groups, then it gives them another option and may explain why they act as they do. The next step will be to ask why females choose to mate with these subordinate males - males can't simply force their way into another group and mate with a female, she has to leave the group, so we need to investigate it from a female perspective." said Young.
"The most likely explanation is that such females are unable to mate within their own group - for example, they may be closely related to all the males within it."