Meerkat

[ExFmem]

nan and Mel for your quiz scores. Kinda fun, huh?
Oh wow, nan, love your pics I know you have even more up your sleeve I'll be patiently waiting...

[Flutterby]

Great pics everyone.

I've never seen a meerkat in the wild, only at the Lion Park.

[nan]

Flutts, yours seems a bit fat -O

[Flutterby]

They probably get fed too much! -O

[Mel]

But they're just as cute as the rest of the bunch here!

[ExFmem]

Thanks for all the great contributions here. Welcome aboard PRWIN and Flutterby, love the pics! Even if some of you don't have photos, you can still add an interesting fact or some information we can all learn from. Come one, come all! (I sound like a carnival barker.)

[ExFmem]

Diet:
Eating both plants and animals, meerkats are omnivores. They can even find their food when it's hiding underground. Meerkats can dig very quickly to find insects (the biggest part of their diet), which they sniff out using their enhanced sense of smell. Their menu includes beetles, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, worms, crickets, small mammals, small reptiles, birds, eggs, tubers, roots, fruit, and even poisonous scorpions. They can catch a scorpion and pull off its deadly stinger in the blink of an eye.





Young meerkats do not know what kind of food to eat, so their mother or another adult teaches them. While adult meerkats have some immunity to scorpion stings, a scorpion’s large pincers can still do plenty of damage, and the pups have to learn to deal carefully with this dangerous food item. Each meerkat must find its own food, but they may share the task of capturing and eating a large lizard or other large food item.
Because they have very little fat to store energy, meerkats forage and hunt every day. They have a home territory of about 4 square miles (10 square kilometers) or more and hunt in a different section each day, returning to the first area after a week.

Pop Quiz: Even though insects make up the largest percentage of their diet, one insect is NOT eaten by the meerkats, and in fact, live right along side of them in their burrows. What insect is it, and why are they tolerated?

[Dewi]

A type of beetle that feeds on the meerkat poop so keeps the dens clean?

[Amoli]

Super Pics, everyone.. and great information.

Well.... I am still trying to determine the difference between a mongoose and a meerkat...

So... meerkat is not just an Afrikaans name for mongoose... -O

BBL - Be back later..

[nan]

@ Dewi... you are too fast