Nutritional needs and social bonds: how early-life dependencies shape meerkat sociality

Across species, social systems vary in their extent of interactions, competition, cooperation, and cohesion. Though there has been considerable research on overall social structures, the dynamics of how an individual's social niche develops during early life and how biological needs of offspring shape sociality has received less attention. In this study, we took a longitudinal approach targeting the developmental period from nutritional dependency to independent foraging, and toward sexual maturity, to assess within-group sociality of a cooperative mammal, wild Kalahari meerkats (Suricata suricatta). First, we used a novel approach to disentangle individual-specific from dyad-specific tendencies to interact to characterize social within-group dynamics during foraging. Second, we then used these two sociality features to identify formation of social relationships during early development. By combining proximity scans with data on social interactions from focal follows, we investigated the biologically relevant behaviours driving the observed social interactions. Our results show that meerkat sociality is generally highly dynamic with respect to dyadic relationships. The strength of dyadic relationships between pups and adults was highest during pups’ nutritional dependence and was positively linked to pup-care behaviors initiated by both adults and pups themselves, while such dyadic relationships decreased in strength after nutritional independence. During early ontogeny, meerkat pups rely heavily on food provisions for survival and learning of their species-specific diet to develop their independent foraging skills. As such, our findings indicate that social relationships in meerkats are a by-product of the socio-ecology of cooperative pup care and lack a need for long-term individualized relationships.