Meet Maritime's Meerkats!

Have a meerkat meetup on Memorial Day weekend!  A family of meerkats, one of Africa’s most entertaining species, takes up residence at Norwalk's Maritime Aquarium beginning Memorial Day weekend. They'll hang around until February 2012. Visitors can get up-close-and-personal with these engaging, squirrel-sized creatures who have their own way of doing things. For instance, male and female adults share parenting chores and groups live together, communally. Disney’s “The Lion King,” helped popularize them; the film featured a meerkat, the comical Timon. Later, the Animal Planet television series “Meerkat Manor” (2005-2009), turned them into celebrities.

Meerkats are members of the mongoose family. They live in social “mobs” or “gangs” of up to 30 members in burrows in the Kalahari Desert, in the southern African nations of Botswana and South Africa. Their cooperative societies include a foraging strategy where adults take turns standing guard upright on their hind feet, watching for predators, while the others eat. As “Meerkat Manor” showed, just because they live communally doesn't mean they all get along. The family-based “mobs” have plenty of drama – from internal relationship issues to territorial battles with other “mobs.”  And there is the ever-present fear of jackals and eagles.

“These are active animals with very charismatic faces and highly interesting social structures, so they’ll be a lot of fun for visitors to watch,” said Jack Schneider, the Aquarium’s curator of animals. The exhibit features six sibling meerkats – three males, three females – born in the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, Utah. Their Maritime Aquarium habitat has windows into their underground burrows, so all meerkat activity is on view. And there will be a viewing bubble, so visitors can stand up right among the meerkats. The exhibit runs from Memorial Day weekend until February 2012. For more information, visit the Maritime's website.

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