Learn the Meerkat Language! | BBC Earth

professor Marta Monza is a research biologist at Zurich University she was Tim's first PhD student on the project [Music] she set about investigating meerkat communication with a series of ingenious experiments props are set up before the meerkats emerge from their sleeping burrows today we will try to do a presentation of a chapter that's having read authority of the meerkats here in the Kalahari and as it approaches everybody will probably become exciting and hopefully we will hear the different alarm calls okay maybe you can pull slowly live predators would be difficult to use so instead Marta chose the next best thing [Music] she recorded their alarm calls and discovered the male cats have developed a series of call types a kind of language to warn the others of how close a predator is and what type it is Kasich and Ben - in fasting as the jackal gets closer the meerkats identify the ground predator and prepare for an emergency Mata spent several months presenting various predators to see if the calls were different she even launched a jackal into the air to see if meerkat calls distinguish between ground and aerial predators the results of that experiment were inconclusive but other revelations to date have been remarkable such a sophisticated alarm called the system as in the markets has hardly been described in any other species meerkats have evolved a complex warning system the sounds they make to warn of aerial or terrestrial predators change as the threat grows closer so first moving animal caller now we already have the law article and how it changes into the high urgency and finally they start about Marta and her colleagues have discovered that the meerkats are speaking with a complex repertoire of calls the messages they send each other are distinct and the meaning is very clear play them your choice of recording and you can predict exactly how they will react this sound means bird of prey approaching fast you

Channel: BBC Earth

Views: 513,731

Rating: 4.8591547 out of 5

Keywords: meerkat, meerkat alarm calls, meerkat calls, meerkats, meerkat documentary, wildlife documentary, david attenborough, natural world meerkats, bbc earth, baby meerkats - natural world, the secrets of an animal superstar, how to speak meerkat, meerkat sounds, meerkat manor season 1, bbc documentary, bbcearth, bbc

Id: NokF599u1Ck

Length: 4min 8sec (248 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 21 2018

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