Individual strategies, group dynamics and population regulation in cooperative breeders
Kalahari meerkats live in groups in which a dominant pair produces most of the young and the other members help to raise them. With the long-term, individual-based data of the Kalahari Meerkat Project at the Kalahari Research Centre, collected on every individual since the 1990s, we study how individual strategies, group dynamics and the environment together regulate the population of a cooperative breeder.
Our models link the two levels at which a social population works: within groups, where body mass, dominance and helping shape survival and reproduction, and between groups, where dispersal and the founding of new groups decide how the population grows. They showed, for example, that environmental conditions destabilise population dynamics through body mass, while social factors stabilise them, and that larger groups produce more new breeding groups.
Much of our recent work asks how meerkats cope with an increasingly extreme climate in the Kalahari. Seasonal changes in rainfall and temperature act on the population through body mass before the breeding season. Warmer non-breeding seasons can buffer the effects of drier breeding seasons, but higher temperature extremes worsen the effects of disease, and changes in the periodicity of the environment alter the population’s dynamics. This work is part of our project on populations under environmental change.
From 2015 to 2019, a project with engineers at EPFL followed dispersing meerkats with GPS and motion-sensor collars: dispersal in socially structured populations.
In collaboration with: Marta Manser • Tim Clutton-Brock • Andrew Bateman • Kamiar Aminian