By Susan Milius
Tim Clutton-Brock has suddenly said, for reasons not at all clear to me, “Hard-boiled egg.” Perhaps it’s best to ignore this. So, I ask him again in our phone conversation what he would pick as the highlights of his past 13 years of directing a field study of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert. Meerkats, a type of mongoose, cluster in family groups and share the job of raising the top female’s pups. Clutton-Brock and his colleagues have published reports on meerkat behaviors ranging from altruism to infanticide. But it turns out that the first highlight that he wishes to discuss actually is a hard-cooked egg.
When Clutton-Brock, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Cambridge in England, was setting up the desert study, most meerkats ran away if people got within 300 meters. He and his colleagues “tried everything,” he says, to find treats that would encourage the animals to tolerate people so that the team could collect data.