Qualla: Kalahari Meerkat Project

Kalahari Meerkat Project: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every meerkat here has a name and a file. Births, deaths, pregnancies, who outranks whom, who left one group to join another - all of it written down, decade after decade, for hundreds of individual animals. On a stretch of fossilized red dunes in the South African Kalahari, the Kalahari Meerkat Project keeps life-history records so detailed that the meerkats themselves seem to have forgotten the researchers are even there. Walk among the burrows at dawn and the little sentinels stand upright on a mound, scanning the sky for eagles, unbothered by the humans crouched a few feet away. That trust, earned over thirty years, is what makes this one of the most revealing windows into animal society anywhere in the world.

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Kalahari Meerkat Project: Why Meerkats

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Meerkats are a puzzle that happens to be adorable, and the puzzle is the point. In each group, a single dominant pair does almost all of the breeding while everyone else - subordinate adults who could be raising young of their own - instead spends the day guarding pups, standing ...

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Kalahari Meerkat Project: The Kuruman River Reserve

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The project's home is the Kuruman River Reserve, a stretch of semi-arid Kalahari roughly thirty kilometers west of the small town of Van Zylsrus and only about seventeen kilometers from the Botswana border. The land is classic southern Kalahari: sparsely vegetated fossil dunes th...

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Kalahari Meerkat Project: A Village of Researchers

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Running a study like this takes people, and there are rarely fewer than ten working in the reserve at any time. The core is a rotating crew of ten to fifteen volunteers drawn from around the world, supervised by a field coordinator and a field manager, alongside postgraduate inte...

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Kalahari Meerkat Project: From the Burrow to the Screen

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The world came to know these meerkats through a television: the documentary series Meerkat Manor, which followed real animals from the project's study groups and made household names of creatures most viewers had never heard of. The science and the storytelling were always intert...

Read more: Kalahari Meerkat Project on Qualla