WHEN you first encounter a band of banded mongooses, your initial instinct is to think: “Aww! They are so adorable, so cute, so fluffy.” My first encounter with them was in Queen Elizabeth National Park in western Uganda, which is beautiful and thick with wildlife.
I was under the expert eye of Robert Businge, one of the researchers on the based there. Businge located the group with a radio tracker and made a special call: pu-pu-pu-pu-pu. Out of the bushes tumbled seven bundles of chirruping, inquisitive enthusiasm. He checked they were all present and correct, recorded some data, then told me a horror story about beheadings.
The more I learned about banded mongooses, the more I understood just how deceptive appearances can be. They are aggressively violent animals that wage war on neighbouring groups, brutally murdering and maiming their rivals. They ruthlessly expel close relatives from their group and kill them if they won’t leave, commit infanticide – sometimes against their own offspring – and even engage in cannibalism. “Their whole society is built around warmongering,” says project leader at the University of Exeter, UK.
Advertisement
Such brutal, organised violence is unusual in the animal kingdom. I had come to the park to try to see it for myself, watching as the researchers put mongooses on a war footing with their enemies’ faeces and a Bluetooth speaker, and took drone footage to reveal new details about this gruesome behaviour. These experiments are just the start. In the future, the team hopes these complex animals might give us some insights into our own tendency for violence.
The banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) is one of 25 species of mongoose in Africa. It is about the size of a domestic cat, though shaped more like a weasel, with a pointy nose and stripes. It is a predator, eating mainly millipedes and beetles, but also rodents, lizards and small snakes. While most species of mongoose are solitary, banded ones live in colonies, called bands, of between eight and 55 individuals, occupying a territory of about a square kilometre.
Their social structure is weird. “They do strange things,” says , part of the Banded Mongoose Research Project. There is a subtle dominance hierarchy based on age that involves multiple dominant females, and there are two or three dominant males that jealously chaperone the females when they are in oestrus and do all the mating. The rest of the males are celibate subordinates.
Unusually, every female is allowed to breed. Uniquely, they all give birth on the same night, four times a year. “The pups get mixed up and don’t know who their mother is,” says Businge. The mechanism of this “supersynchrony” is unknown: the females, starting with the dominants, mate over the course of a week, with some giving birth prematurely to hit the deadline. If it goes wrong, and a pregnant female fails to deliver on time, every single one of the pups is killed and sometimes eaten. If this takes place in the open, the aftermath can look like a battlefield. “It’s carnage, headless bodies, half-eaten bodies,” says Cant. “The group is run by infanticidal females.”
If they survive, the pups are suckled collectively and babysat by males in their dens. Once out of the den, at 4 weeks old, each pup gets a dedicated, unrelated escort – another unique feature of mongooses – that looks after them for a month and shows them how to forage – demonstrating, for example, which millipedes need cleaning before being eaten.
These peculiar social arrangements make banded mongooses a really useful model of the evolution of co-operative behaviour such as altruism, one of the great mysteries of biology. Cant and his team have been studying them in Queen Elizabeth National Park for 27 years, discovering birth synchrony and other unusual aspects of banded mongoose society.
The Banded Mongoose Research Project
The national park is on the shore of Lake Edward, close to the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a cobra’s spit from the equator. It is home to elephants, hippos, lions, leopards, buffalo, hyenas and warthogs, which form a special relationship with banded mongooses (see “Unlikely friends”). There are also pythons, baboons, countless gorgeous birds – plus a spectacularly ugly one, the marabou stork. The Banded Mongoose Research Project is currently tracking about 10 mongoose groups of perhaps 250 individuals. Many are habituated to humans and will come to the researchers’ call without fear.
One reason for studying banded mongooses is their propensity for violence. If a group gets too big or too inbred, an eviction is in order. A handful of individuals are attacked and hounded out, or killed if they won’t leave. The evictees wander the bush for a few weeks until they are eaten by eagles, leopards, lions or cobras – the leading cause of death among adults, which have a life expectancy of three to four years – or encounter a group with too many involuntarily celibate males, which voluntarily evict themselves to form a new group.
Eviction is relatively gentle for banded mongooses. They also wage war on their neighbours, invading their territory and fighting tooth and claw, sometimes to the death. The two groups face off in lines like in a medieval battle, issuing shrill war cries, then pile into one another. Males do the fighting and come off worse. If one gets separated from the melee, he is in big trouble. “They pin you down on your back, spread your legs and all bite you and you die from injuries,” says Businge. Such deaths are quite rare: the adult mortality rate in battle is about 0.5 per cent, comparable with the historical average for human conflict. But serious injury is common.
Over the years, Cant and his team have observed 579 banded mongoose wars, which is a tiny fraction of the number that must have occurred. One of their studies found that .
There are many reasons to declare war. Cant initially thought it was , with the dominant females leading the charge while in oestrus and using the chaos of battle to give their guards the slip so they can mate covertly with males from the other group. Around 20 per cent of banded mongoose pups are conceived this way, says Cant. This is a form of exploitative leadership where the leader gains benefits at the expense of her cannon fodder, but it could benefit the group by reducing the amount of inbreeding, says Cant.
But covert mating isn’t the only casus belli. When they looked more closely at their records, the researchers discovered that 417 of the 579 wars didn’t involve females in oestrus. These appear to be more about status, territory, resources – and genocide. Many seem to be initiated by males and deliberately target the rival group’s young. Around 20 per cent of all pup deaths of known cause occur in wars, with female pups twice as likely to be killed, which partly explains the typical sex ratio in a group of 1.6 males to every female. “It’s a good idea to target female pups in a rival group, they are the lifeblood of the group and if you knock them out, the group is going to go extinct,” says Cant. The winning group can then expand its territory to access more foraging areas.
According to Businge, a group can estimate the strength of its foe before the war starts, possibly by footprints or scent. If they have a numerical advantage, the mongooses will attack. If not, they retreat. Where groups are of similar strength, the war can escalate, with waves of attacks from both sides until one group backs down or a truce is called and peace breaks out – temporarily.
What happens in a mongoose fight?
Exactly what goes on in a fight is hard to fathom. It is total mayhem, with the males from both sides forming a screaming, roiling maul. “They kick up a dust storm and it’s deafening” says Cant. There are pincer movements and flanking charges. It is sometimes possible to see females sneaking off to make love not war, but the actual fighting is a ball of confusion. How groups coordinate their movements and what determines success or failure remain unknown.
After 10 to 20 minutes – though battles between large, well-matched groups can rage for an hour or more – one side backs down and scarpers, leaving its walking wounded limping in its wake.
Cant recounts these stories of love and violence over an evening beer or three. The following morning, I am hoping to see it in action as we are preparing for war. The team is planning an experiment to induce battle behaviour in a 35-strong group of unhabituated banded mongooses, using faeces from another group – which smells horrible, according to Businge, and I take his word for it – and an audio recording of their battle cries on a Bluetooth speaker. Cant is going to film the unfolding drama with a drone.
We locate the group and let them acclimatise to our presence. The mongooses approach warily, but are soon happily rootling around looking for insects, . (The calls encode two bits of information: who they are and what they are doing, “Joe digging”, “Sue searching”, “Kit moving”.) They are clearly interested in the faeces, sniffing around it and scent-marking the slab it is presented on. Then the drone goes up – it is noisy but doesn’t spook the mongooses – and the action begins.
When Mwanguhya plays the war cry, the reaction is instant: the scattered mongooses coalesce as a group, writhe around in a ball and then suddenly flee as a phalanx. This time, they decided to retreat, possibly because they are at the edge of their territory, says Businge. But, on other occasions, they have confronted the “enemy” in battle formation.
The drone footage is revealing that the mongooses mass around a single individual for a few seconds, which then apparently makes the call to retreat and leads the group off. It isn’t known whether that mongoose is a male or female, or a recognised war leader, or how it communicates to the group.
The next day, we try again with a larger group that Cant thinks will be more belligerent. We use the same set-up and, sure enough, the mongooses line up in battle formation and start a cacophonous advance on the bush where the speaker is hidden. They keep inching forwards and then sidle into the bush as if to launch a surprise flanking attack. If there were real rival mongooses in there, I daresay they would have had their furry butts kicked.
The drone footage of this experiment is a world first, and a dry run for Cant’s next project. The plan is to use GPS collars to track all of the banded mongooses in real time (the researchers currently attach radio collars to two members of each group), keep a weather eye for warnings of an impending war and then launch a drone to film it. The team will then use AI to analyse the footage to understand which individuals started the fight, which coordinated each side and what determined success and failure. “This new technology gives us a completely new perspective,” says Cant.
Human warfare
The hope is that one day we will be able to learn something about the evolution of our own bellicose tendencies. According to Cant, warfare is one of the key forces shaping the evolution of cooperation and social behaviour in humans, as well as our tendency to dehumanise outsiders. “Humans and mongooses are among the most warlike animals on the planet,” he says.
The idea of studying warfare in banded mongooses and applying it to humans is in its infancy. “Using animal models to better understand human warfare, I think, is a very interesting and promising new perspective,” says social psychologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “For a long time we thought human warfare was something cultural and specific to our species.” As well as banded mongooses, other animals that live in groups, including lions and chimpanzees, can display similar behaviours to the way humans go about warfare. “The beauty of using animal models is that we can see the basics, we may not need language and higher cognition to engage in the type of warfare humans engage in,” he says.
Uganda has endured plenty of human conflict – colonialism, the reign and overthrow of military dictator Idi Amin, the civil wars of the 1980s and 90s and the recent reign of terror by the Lord’s Resistance Army. On my last day in Mweya, the village in the national park where I was staying, I met two 20-something brothers who lost their parents in that insurgency. I thought of my own sons. I thought of Ukraine and the threat hanging over all of us from nuclear weapons. I thought about coming conflicts over climate change.
Is it possible that banded mongooses will give us insights into our own tendencies? “The evolution of culture and intelligence obviously make humans potentially very different to other species, and that must always be kept in mind,” says at the University of Oxford, who studies war in bacteria. “For this reason, I am not yet confident that the study of animal or bacterial warfare will teach us a great deal about human warfare specifically, but I think it deserves exploring.”
Meanwhile, the banded mongooses have a new conflict brewing: with marabou storks. They meet on the rubbish dump in Mweya, an unnatural situation created by humans. The storks are scavengers and have learned that they can scoop up banded mongoose pups and swallow them whole. The mongooses have yet to learn that the storks are a threat. “I don’t study mongooses for their cognitive abilities,” says Cant. Some species, it seems, never learn from experience.
Unlikely friends
Another unique feature of banded mongooses is that they have a mutualistic relationship with another mammal – the only known mammal-mammal mutualism in the world. Their partner is the warthog, a very common sight in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda.
Mutualisms usually involve species from different groups, such as bees pollinating flowers, oxpeckers pecking ticks off buffalo and birds cleaning crocodiles’ teeth.
The warthogs appear to initiate the process, approaching the banded mongooses and flopping down. The mongooses then go to work cleaning the hogs – presumably of parasites, though nobody knows for sure – and get an easy meal in the process. The interactions last a few minutes and can involve several mongooses, until the warthog has had enough and shrugs them off.
The mutualism is somewhat artificial. Banded mongooses and warthogs rarely interact in the wild, but come together at the rubbish dump in Mweya, a village in the park.
“The mongooses must be picking something off,” says Leela Channer at the University of Exeter, UK, who has just started the world’s first study of this interaction. “Ticks or lice, or maybe cleaning off the mud.” Let’s just hope they stay friends and don’t start a war.
Graham Lawton is a features writer at New Scientist
