JOHANNESBURG — One of the most captivating sights of African wildlife is that of dark-eyed meerkats standing side-by-side on their hind legs, as though posing for a group photograph. They look cuddly and endearing. But a new study says they have a dark side.
The dominant female meerkat in a group banishes the other females when they give birth, killing and even eating their offspring to ensure a plentiful food supply for the alpha couple’s own pups and a labor pool of meerkat babysitters who don’t have their own young to rear.
In the mass media, meerkats have a gentler image, inspiring advertisers, a character in the animated movie ‘‘The Lion King,’’ and a TV documentary series that told the story of a meerkat family in southern Africa.
The recent study by a group of British and South African universities, as well as the Kalahari Meerkat Project in South Africa, builds on observations that dominant meerkats use violence to regulate breeding in their own group and to survive in tough, desert environments.
‘‘Since meerkats are cute and fluffy, and have been saccharine, anthropomorphized poster children for happy family life, it comes across as more shocking,’’ the study’s leader, Dr. Matthew Bell of the University of Edinburgh’s School of Biological Sciences, wrote in an e-mail. Contrary to the public perception, he wrote, meerkat lives are ‘‘nasty, brutish, and short!’’
The study, published in July in Nature Communications, an online journal, analyzed the effect of giving contraceptive jabs to adult female helpers in 12 groups of meerkats in the Kalahari Desert to ensure they could not reproduce for six months. During that period, dominant females were less aggressive toward the subordinates, foraged more, gained more weight, and had bigger pups.
The female helpers, in turn, provided more care and food for the dominant female’s offspring, according to the research.