Research Themes

Banded mongooses are one of the most social members of the mongoose family (Herpestidae). They live in stable groups of around twenty animals of both sexes, plus their offspring, and defend year-round territories. They sleep together in an underground den, and set off each day on a foraging trip, digging up beetles and millipedes. Over the years we have uncovered many surprising and unusual features of banded mongoose social groups which make them an ideal system to test theories about how animal societies – including human societies – evolved. Below is a list of some of our main research themes.

Intergroup conflict

Banded mongooses are one of the most intensely warlike mammals on the planet. Mongoose groups are extremely territorial, and frequently enter into violent fights with their neighbours over food and mates. These fights can be deadly: rates of death in battle in banded mongooses are comparable to those observed in humans and chimpanzees. We know that many of these fights are started by females as a way of avoiding inbreeding. Females lead their group into encounters with neighbouring groups and use the chaos of battle to mate with rival males. Because we know almost everything about the individuals in our population, from birth to death, we can use the mongooses to test more general theories about the causes and consequences of warfare in animal societies. Our current research, funded by an ERC Advanced Grant, aims to unravel what drives groups to such extreme levels of conflict, and what factors might promote peace between groups. Read a some of our research findings here.

Banded mongooses are cooperative breeders: a breeding system in which some group members cooperate to protect and feed offspring that are not their own. But unlike other cooperative breeders, in banded mongooses some adult helpers - called ‘escorts’ - form a one-to-one bond with pups to which they are unrelated. These escorts protect and feed ‘their’ pup and teach them foraging skills. We have also shown that parents cannot distinguish their own offspring in the communal litter, which creates a ‘veil of ignorance’ about parentage and promotes the equal treatment of offspring. Since adults don’t know which pups are their own, they provide extra food to the smallest and weakest offspring in the communal litter, levelling up inequality and equalising each offspring’s chance of surviving to adulthood.

Read about escorting and the veil of ignorance in mongoose groups here.

Evolution of cooperation

I am the Banded Mongoose Research Project Field Manager and have been working with the mongooses together with Mike since 1996. I am responsible for the day to day management and organisation of the field work. I have enjoyed seeing the project grow and develop over the years, and still enjoy seeing the mongooses every day. I particularly enjoy seeing new packs form in our population as I like the challenge of habituating wild individuals and comparing the behaviour of new packs with established ones. For this reason, I have a soft spot for Pack 19, a new pack on the peninsula, and am keen to get to know them as they become more habituated. I like reading novels and my favourite book is Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I am also a keen sportsman and Manchester United fan. I have a wife, Edna, and four children: Sylvia, Evelyn, Shivan and Kelvin.

Life history evolution

I started working on the Banded Mongoose Research Project back in 2001 and so have a great deal of knowledge and experience with the mongooses. My favourite pack is Pack 1H because, even though they don’t encounter humans very much, they are still really habituated and fun to work with. I particularly like doing pup and oestrus focals because it’s exciting to see pups competing for their escorts and to see males fighting to mate with females! I love seeing other wildlife in QENP while I work, and I have many stories of encounters with elephants. I like to travel to new places and see different parts of Uganda. I’m an avid supporter of Manchester United and like to watch them on TV when I can. My wife, Agnes, and I have three children: Wellness, Happiness and Greatness. My greatest wish is for them to get a good education.

Life history refers to how animals grow, survive and reproduce across their lifespan. Testing how different patterns of life history evolved requires studies of animals living in their natural environment, exposed to natural predators and pathogens. Because of the detail and continuity of our data, the banded mongoose system has proved to be a powerful model system to test ideas about why some individuals develop faster, or age more quickly, than others. We have studied how conditions experienced early in life can have consequences for health and fitness in adulthood; and investigate why, unusually for social mammals, banded mongoose males live substantially longer lives than females.

Read about our life history findings here, here, and here.

How does collective behaviour emerge from natural selection acting on individual agents? This is a question of great current interest in biology. Banded mongooses exhibit many remarkable examples of collective behaviour, from the extreme birth synchrony of breeding females, to the collective battles which are fought by teams of male warriors. We are currently using drones and detailed tracking methods to investigate how groups remain cohesive as they move around their environment, how they coordinate to form ‘battle lines’ during intergroup conflicts, and how they decide which animals will stay behind to babysit offspring at the den.

Read about some of our findings on collective behaviour here and here.

Collective behaviour and coordination

I joined the project in 2010 and have quickly become a knowledgeable and valued member of the team. I’m another Pack 1H fan and enjoy working with them because they are playful, fun and cheeky. A favourite part of my work is oestrus focals because I find it interesting to see males fiercely mate guarding females, and pestering males trying desperately to sneak a mating behind their back! In my spare time, I love all things football. My team is Arsenal and Theo Walcott is my favourite player. I’m a talented footballer myself and regularly play in defence for the Mweya Hippos. I have a wife, Christine, and a son, M. Edison.

Reproductive conflict

I’m a relatively new addition to the team, starting on the project in 2011. I’ve enjoyed my work since day one, and combine fieldwork with a special interest in veterinary and laboratory technical work. I take all blood samples and really enjoy trapping the mongooses ensuring they are handled with upmost care and attention. My favourite pack is Pack 2 because I spent a lot of time habituating them and know them really well. My hard work has paid off as this previously nervous and skittish pack is now very calm and comfortable in our presence. I’m also a trained mechanic and try wherever possible to fix our vehicles when they break down. I have aspirations to one day set up my own business working with cars. I’m a football fanatic and am a passionate Manchester United, and Wayne Rooney, supporter. I also like playing football for the Mweya Hippos and watching Jean Claude Van Damme action movies!

In most cooperatively breeding birds and mammals, reproduction is monopolised by one or two dominant female breeders. In banded mongooses, however, all females in the group older than one year can, and do, reproduce. For years we have tried to understand why reproduction is shared among females in this system. Our research has revealed that the answer lies in the extreme birth synchrony observed in this system, where all pregnant females usually synchronise their births to the exact same morning. By giving birth in perfect synchrony, females mix up the usual cues to maternity, removing the ability of dominant females to identify and kill the offspring of rival females. Synchronous birth is also the trick by which subordinate females escape the reproductive control of dominants.

Read more about this remarkable and unique birth system here and here.

One of the downsides of living in tight knit groups, in which immigration is almost non-existent, is the risk of inbreeding. Female banded mongooses avoid inbreeding to some extent by mating with males from other groups. Over time, however, group members become genetically more similar to each other, leading to violent internal conflicts and the forced expulsion of groups of females, and sometimes groups of males too. These genetic drivers of conflict and dispersal have been uncovered by painstaking genetic analyses, revealing in exceptional detail how genetic factors shape the dynamics of the population.

Read more about our work on inbreeding and population structure here and here.

Inbreeding and population structure

I have been working for the mongoose project since 2012. My favourite group is pack 19, as this was my first group and I have spent a lot of time with them. I enjoy taking care of pack 1B and pack 2’s territory and habituating groups. In my spare time I enjoy watching football, supporting Manchester United.

Social learning

Cooperation is ubiquitous in nature, and why and how animals cooperate is one of the big questions in evolutionary biology. I want to understand how social behaviour affects fitness and health of individuals, and how this feeds into life history allocation and evolution of sociality. Banded mongooses are an ideal system for studying these effects. Egalitarian at first sight, pack members vary a lot in the amount of help the give to and receive from others. My current project investigates the impacts of early-life social environment: whether some mongoose pups born with a ‘silver spoon’ also do better as adults, and the proximate role of oxidative stress and telomere dynamics in senescence and life history evolution.

We can use the banded mongoose escort system as a natural cross-fostering experiment to disentangle genetic and cultural influences on development. We have shown experimentally that pups learn foraging techniques from their escorts via imitation. Using stable isotopes and genetic analyses, we have also demonstrated that pups inherit their lifelong foraging niche from their escort, not their genetic parents. Recently, we have uncovered evidence that escort cognitive skills affect the survival chances of the offspring in their care (but not in the way we expected!).

Read about these studies here and here.

Banded mongooses are extremely vocal animals. While moving around in the bush they emit a constant stream of grunts and growls, occasional squeals and, when a predator is around, loud shrieks. We have studied the acoustic properties of these calls using innovative experiments and playbacks. Our studies have revealed that banded mongoose ‘contact calls’ – short, soft grunts – convey information about who they are and what they are doing. Effectively, their calls convey information such as ‘Amy, digging’, ‘Bob, walking’, and so on.

Read more about this remarkable aspect of their vocalisations (known as segmental concatenation) here.

Communication

I am a behavioural ecologist with broad interests in conservation, ecology and animal behaviour. My research investigates how conflict arises and is resolved in cooperative species, and how individual level behaviour can have group and population level effects. I study within- and between-group conflict and population dynamics in banded mongooses: specifically, I am interested in why individuals are evicted from their group and what happens to them after they leave. I also study aggressive interactions between neighbouring groups in the population to understand what drives groups to engage in costly fights with one another. I aim to explain how these conflicts can affect the behaviour and spatial organisation of groups, and the dynamics of the wider population.

Mongoose videos by Feargus Cooney, Leela Channer.