The striped mongoose has long been used as a model for animal cooperation. Now, Ugandan researchers are beginning to understand the stark reality of the long and bloody battle.
life
January 30, 2023
Striped mongoose live in colonies of 8 to 55 individuals and often go to war with rivals. Anoop Shah/Getty Images
When you first encounter a herd of striped mongoose, your first instinct is to think: They are so adorable, so cute, so fluffy. Our first encounter with them was in the beautiful and wildlife-rich Queen Elizabeth National Park in western Uganda.
I was under the expert watch of Robert Businge, one of the researchers in the Timber Mongoose Research Project based there. Businge located the group on his radio tracker and made a special call: pu-pu-pu-pu-pu. Seven bundles of chirping and curious enthusiasm tumbled out of the bushes. He made sure they all existed and were correct, recorded some data, and then told me a terrifying story about decapitation.
The more I learned about striped mongooses, the more I realized how deceptive their appearance could be. They are aggressively violent animals, waging war on neighboring groups and brutally killing and maiming rivals. They ruthlessly expel their next of kin from the group, killing them if they do not leave, committing infanticide, sometimes even of their own offspring, and even cannibalizing them. “Their whole society is built around warmongering,” says Michael Cant, project leader at the University of Exeter, UK.
Such brutal and systematic violence is rare in the animal kingdom. I came to the park to see for myself. Watching researchers put mongooses on a war footing with enemy dung and Bluetooth speakers, they took drone footage to reveal new details about this terrifying behavior. These experiments…
