Meerkats - the most murderous mammal!
September 29, 2016 6:20 PM   Subscribe

Cute but deadly
Which mammal is most likely to be murdered by its own kind? It’s certainly not humans—not even close. Nor is it a top predator like the grey wolf or lion, although those at least are #11 and #9 in the league table of murdery mammals. No, according to a study led by José María Gómez from the University of Granada, the top spot goes to… the meerkat.

Gauge your risk based on your species with this fun graph!
posted by hilaryjade (39 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
more like MURDERkats amirite
posted by The otter lady at 6:34 PM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


How do they calculate how murderous humans are? Do the tens millions war deaths count? There's a few years there around the 1940's where we might have been giving the meerkats a run for their money.
posted by bukvich at 6:41 PM on September 29, 2016


I thought this article was pretty problematic. Agustin Fuentes, a primatologist, gave a good set of criticisms in this article. In particular, infanticide and war are not the same thing, and also:
Then they state that, as a percentage of total population numbers, it decreases in nation-state societies with the capacities to enforce broader social control. There is room to debate this, but it is not an outlandish assertion at all. Many researchers have made similar arguments. However, in the article the authors leap from this line of reasoning to the assertion that “humans have phylogenetically inherited their propensity for violence.” Meaning we are naturally lethally violent and we are so due to its origin in our deep past. But what their actual data show is a level of about two percent for the vast majority of our evolutionary history and then an increase when political and economic complexity and inequality ramp up.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:44 PM on September 29, 2016 [4 favorites]


"No one's ever been attacked by one of those, Lotterby, or if they have been, they never noticed."
posted by charred husk at 6:58 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


How do they calculate how murderous humans are? Do the tens millions war deaths count? There's a few years there around the 1940's where we might have been giving the meerkats a run for their money.

No way were 20% of humanity's deaths, even in WW2, one person being killed by another. In certain localities and regions, sure, but worldwide? No way. We can't compete with the meerkats. Actually we can, but so far we haven't gotten there and I don't want us to try.
posted by tclark at 7:37 PM on September 29, 2016


This is where I point out, yet again, that human war has a horizon in time, and it's somewhere in the neolithic. Furry art predates war, by 15ky.

All of the neanderthals were dead twenty thousand years before the first war, and a good thing, or they'd be very disappointed in us.

War, among humans, is technology, not nature. Outside of war, murder is aberration, where the monkey-head-meat screws up, not a natural order.

So, yeah. We really don't even rate, here.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:38 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


There's a few years there around the 1940's where we might have been giving the meerkats a run for their money

Let's pull some numbers out our ass to see if this makes sense- guessing maybe 100M killed (probably more like 25M) in WWII and related out of a population that was probably much higher than 1Bn. So no.
posted by wotsac at 7:38 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


Not all killings of one person by another are murders, though. Surely relatively few killings of one meerkat by another are.
posted by kenko at 7:50 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


Probably a lot of those meerkat-on-meerkat killings were justifiable meerkaticide, at worst.
posted by The otter lady at 8:09 PM on September 29, 2016 [9 favorites]


Why did I not learn this watching Animal Planet's Meerkat Manor?
posted by Ambrosia Voyeur at 8:11 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


(Actual numbers: 60-90 million killed in WWII out of a 2.3 billion. That's an incredibly high number of people killed, but even if each person who died was killed by a single other person who only killed one person, the that would only make 3% or so of the population killers, whereas there were some people who were quite prolific in killing while most did very little directly. )
posted by wotsac at 8:13 PM on September 29, 2016


You missed the outtakes, the BBC made those into Meerkat Manor Murder Mystery, it should be showing up on Netflix in a month or two.
posted by indubitable at 8:37 PM on September 29, 2016 [5 favorites]


Baby-Murdering Meerkat Alpha Females Enslave Subordinates As Wet Nurses

After killing lower-level females' pups, ruthless dominant meerkats force the childless moms to nanny the alpha's brood--those that resist are exiled …
I think menopause has as much to do with forestalling the possibility of this among humans as it does with wiser older females helping their daughters and nieces raise their children.
posted by jamjam at 9:00 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


Movie: APE SHALL NOT KILL APE

Science: ha ha ha oh you
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:02 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


#15 California ground squirrel
#27 Belding's ground squirrel

Squirrels! Why am I not surprised!? I always instinctively knew you had to watch your back around those, um, squirrely little fuckers.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 9:06 PM on September 29, 2016 [6 favorites]


Hakuna matata!
posted by blueberry at 9:13 PM on September 29, 2016 [3 favorites]


Humans always want to be special at something.
posted by benzenedream at 9:44 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


“Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape, and they murder each other." —slightly modified Terry Pratchett quote by Death in Hogfather
posted by XMLicious at 10:07 PM on September 29, 2016


huh, i would've thought chimps to be most murderous. they are v murderous iirc.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:18 PM on September 29, 2016


Compare the meerkat...
posted by Segundus at 10:32 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


California Ground Squirrels are vicious little cannibals. I've personally seen them drag injured squirrels from the road and eat them alive.
posted by The Power Nap at 10:52 PM on September 29, 2016 [2 favorites]


“The study demonstrates the importance of recognizing humans as animals more generally, and primates more specifically,” says Patricia Lambert, an anthropologist at Utah State University. “There is a tendency to see human behavior as distinct from that of all other members of the animal kingdom and I think this hinders our understanding of the human brain and behavior.”


I strongly agree with this. People tend to cling tenaciously to the notion that we're something above and apart from animals, and it not only hinders our understanding in a broader scientific sense, but in a social one. We are still controlled and driven by the compelling needs of our animal bodies and our instincts. I don't think that makes us any less remarkable; quite the contrary, we're incredible creatures! I just can't help but think if we understood each other that way we might be healthier, safer, more empathetic, more humane.
posted by louche mustachio at 11:22 PM on September 29, 2016 [1 favorite]


#15 California ground squirrel
#27 Belding's ground squirrel

Squirrels! Why am I not surprised!? I always instinctively knew you had to watch your back around those, um, squirrely little fuckers.


That's just your typical ground squirrel, though.

You see a lot less of this sort of thing among prime cuts of squirrel.
posted by Sys Rq at 12:11 AM on September 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


(But seriously, ground squirrels are your groundhogs and prairie dogs and gophers and chipmunks and whatnot. The bushy-tailed guys, the squirrely ones we actually call squirrels, are tree squirrels.)
posted by Sys Rq at 12:13 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


This research will be pored over by Chief Bogo of the Zootopia Police Department.
posted by Coda Tronca at 12:33 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]




(But seriously, ground squirrels are your groundhogs and prairie dogs and gophers and chipmunks and whatnot. The bushy-tailed guys, the squirrely ones we actually call squirrels, are tree squirrels.)


And then there is Franklin's Ground Squirrel which confused the Hell out of me because it looks a whole lot like a gray tree squirrel but with a smooth tail.

I do not know how murderous they are, but I do know that one of them shit in my tent. I assume they are some sort of criminal.
posted by louche mustachio at 12:34 AM on September 30, 2016 [6 favorites]


Which mammal is most likely to be murdered by its own kind?

And for an extra bonus point, what mammal do I, sebastienbailard, continually mispronounce/miswrite as "meekrat" when I'm not paying attention.
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:11 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


I do not know how murderous they are, but I do know that one of them shit in my tent. I assume they are some sort of criminal.

Are you sure you didn't pitch your tent in a Ground Squirrel Poop Zone without a permit? Maybe the real criminal was inside us all along.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:13 AM on September 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


Certainly it was inside our tent in one form or another.
posted by No-sword at 3:12 AM on September 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


Yeah? Well, you know who's not on your fancy list? The honey badger. Honey badgers don't kill honey badgers. I don't need to tell you why.
posted by analogue at 3:37 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


But seriously, ground squirrels are your groundhogs and prairie dogs and gophers and chipmunks and whatnot. The bushy-tailed guys, the squirrely ones we actually call squirrels, are tree squirrels.

Yes you are correct. The biologists have got their lexicography messed up though.

Greek skiouros, from skia shadow + oura tail

No bushy tail -> not really a squirrel unless you are Humpty Dumpty using words to mean what ever you want 'em to mean.
posted by bukvich at 6:37 AM on September 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


I do not know how murderous they are, but I do know that one of them shit in my tent. I assume they are some sort of criminal.

really you're lucky you weren't murdered
posted by poffin boffin at 7:52 AM on September 30, 2016 [7 favorites]


I don't know about ground squirrels, but I scrupulously avoid the range of the Great Eastern Pooping Murder Squirrel, and I've never had cause to regret it.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:22 AM on September 30, 2016 [4 favorites]


We are still controlled and driven by the compelling needs of our animal bodies and our instincts. I don't think that makes us any less remarkable; quite the contrary, we're incredible creatures! I just can't help but think if we understood each other that way we might be healthier, safer, more empathetic, more humane.

In my experience, this kind of thinking is normally used as an attempt to normalize problematic behaviour. For scientists with the proper context, of course they are going to be aware of this. For the general public, though, this kind of thinking is used to normalize alpha-male behaviour, sexist behaviour, etc. etc.

Unless what you mean is that an awareness of the biological nature of problematic behaviour allows us to transcend it in the interest of creating a society which respects and supports all of its members. Then I'm on board.
posted by ianhattwick at 10:03 AM on September 30, 2016


In my experience, this kind of thinking is normally used as an attempt to normalize problematic behaviour. For scientists with the proper context, of course they are going to be aware of this. For the general public, though, this kind of thinking is used to normalize alpha-male behaviour, sexist behaviour, etc. etc.

Not to mention homosexuality, matriarchal societies, etc. etc. My, what absolute monsters the ignorant unwashed general public are.
posted by Sys Rq at 12:32 PM on September 30, 2016


It's actually a little-known fact that "meer" derives from the Dutch cognate of "murder." As late as the Elizabethan era, Shakespeare said "... a murther-cat, whose murth'ring/ be interrupted but to shit in tents."
posted by No-sword at 4:52 PM on September 30, 2016 [4 favorites]


Abandon your fear of Flash websites and play with somew meerkats here.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:27 PM on September 30, 2016


I was just reading, somewhere, about 400 ppm CO2. Humans may not be the most murderous, but perhaps we can take home the trophy for Depraved Indifference or something.
posted by fredludd at 1:02 AM on October 1, 2016 [1 favorite]


I was just reading, somewhere, about 400 ppm CO2.

Don't cross the threads.
posted by tivalasvegas at 8:07 AM on October 1, 2016


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