Video: Meerkats attend scorpion-hunting kindergarten

Teachers look away now: animal behavioural studies are blurring the boundaries between humans and animals, and challenging the idea that teaching is built on intelligence.

“People used to think of teaching as a clever behaviour,” says Alex Thornton of the University of Cambridge. “In other words, you couldn’t teach unless you were aware of the ignorance of your pupil.”

Nevertheless, it now seems that meerkats – which although cute are not thought to have any great levels of intelligence – routinely teach pups how to hunt.

Although meerkats live in large colonies, they tend to be solitary hunters. That means meerkat pups can’t learn how to hunt by simply joining the adult foraging expeditions, says Thornton. Neither is it likely that they will serendipitously learn how to deal with scorpions and other tasty morsels.


Scorpion ‘toys’

“Young pups are rubbish at foraging,” Thornton says. “They virtually never find difficult prey items like scorpions.”

Instead, adult meerkats must actively show pups how to forage. They do so by catching the scorpions themselves and presenting the dead arthropods to the pups. As the pups grow older and more experienced, adults switch to presenting the pups with living scorpions, to help the pupils hone their killing skills.

However, although that behaviour may appear intelligent, Thornton found that the adult’s behaviour is simply prompted by changes in pup begging calls – it’s unlikely that the adult meerkats possess a “theory of mind” that allows them to see the world through the pup’s eyes.

“Rather than thinking of teaching as clever, we should ask whether it’s necessary,” says Thornton. It makes sense for adult meerkats to teach scorpion-hunting skills to pups – even if those pups are not their own – because the meerkat group grows once the pups learn to fend for themselves.

“A large group is less likely to be predated, which means individuals can spend more time foraging,” he adds.

Ant school

David Premack at the University of Pennsylvania, US, doubts that meerkats can teach us about human behaviour.

“All animal teaching has one goal – food,” he says. “So the impetus for teaching in animals is extremely narrow. In humans, the impetus for teaching is essentially unbounded.”

Nigel Franks at the University of Bristol, UK, thinks that animal teaching can encompass more than just food. He has shown that a knowledgeable ant can physically guide a nest mate to a new nest site, and that this is a form of teaching.

Franks and his team have even showed that Temnothorax albipennis ant teachers evaluate the competence of their pupils – something long thought to be possible only with a theory of mind.

The ant teacher guides the pupil to a target in a “tandem run” – the teacher leads the way and the pupil follows closely behind, maintaining contact by tapping the teacher’s rear with its antennae.

Student quality

The two make reasonably rapid progress, but Franks’ team found they could turn an A-grade pupil into a poor one by removing one of its antennae – thus reducing its ability to maintain contact with the teacher and slowing the tandem run to a crawl.

When the researchers removed the pupil ant, the teacher spent less time waiting for it to return if it was a poor performer than if it was a star student, which Franks says suggests the ants can evaluate their pupils’ abilities.

Franks thinks there is a scale of teaching. “At one end there is teaching without thinking, which is based on behavioural algorithms – and a slightly more advanced form of that is teaching with a form of evaluation,” he says. “At the other extreme, there’s teaching with a theory of mind.”

Right now, that advanced form of teaching appears to be exclusive to humans. But human teachers shouldn’t feel too smug – although we possess a theory of mind, Franks thinks it’s not always in operation during teaching.

“If I’m teaching to a class of 100 students, I can’t know what’s going in all of their minds,” he adds.

Journal references:

Thornton – meerkat teaching: Proceedings of the Royal Society B (DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2008.0268)

Thornton – evolution of teaching: Animal Behaviour (DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2007.12.014)

Franks – evaluative teaching in ants: Current Biology (DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2007.08.032)