Innovative problem solving in wild meerkats

Abstract

Behavioural innovations may have far-reaching evolutionary and ecological consequences, allowing individuals to obtain new resources and cope with environmental change. However, as innovations are rarely observed in nature, their emergence is poorly understood. What drives individuals to innovate, and what psychological mechanisms allow them to do so? We used three novel food extraction tasks to address these questions in groups of wild meerkats, Suricata suricatta. Innovatory tendencies were unrelated to body condition and foraging success, but were affected by age, rank and sex. Juvenile individuals were most likely to interact with tasks, but seldom solved them, perhaps owing to their small size or lack of dexterity. Instead, adult subordinates made up the bulk of the innovators. In cooperatively breeding societies, the inability of subordinate helpers to compete physically with dominant breeders may drive them to seek out solutions to novel problems. Most innovators were males, which, as the dispersing sex, may be particularly prone to solve novel problems, and innovators virtually always persisted longer than other group members when interacting with tasks. Most successful individuals solved tasks more than once, and learned to inhibit ineffective prepotent responses across successive presentations of the same task. They did not learn to manipulate functional parts of the apparatus more efficiently, however, nor did they extract general rules allowing them to solve novel tasks faster. Contrary to recent suggestions that innovation may be cognitively demanding, these results suggest that simple, conserved learning processes and dogged perseverance may suffice to generate solutions to novel problems.