PROFESSOR TIM CLUTTON-BROCK

Professor Tim Clutton-Brock is a leading expert on the evolution of animal societies. He is the project director and group leader of the Kalahari Meerkat Project and has a true insider's view into the world of Meerkat Manor. Together with members of his research group at Cambridge, he has worked on the social behavior of insects, fish, birds and mammals, and has established long-term studies of several mammals, including red deer and wild sheep.

The Meerkat Project, located in the Kuruman River Reserve in South Africa, close to the border of Botswana, was designed as a long-term investigation of the evolutionary causes and ecological consequences of meerkats' cooperative behaviors. Over the past decade, Clutton-Brock and his team have monitored the lives of more than a thousand meerkats from birth to death. Their work has documented the wide range of cooperative activities that group members contribute to — from lactating to producing pups by other females to babysitting (without feeding) for 12 hours at a time to selfless defense of other group members threatened by predators.

His work also shows that meerkat societies have a darker side. Only one female in each group breeds, preventing other females from breeding by aggression or eviction from the group. When other females do manage to conceive, dominant females often kill their pups or, if they are challenged, kill or evict their challengers from the group. Clutton-Brock's work has shown how important the dominant's control is for ensuring her own breeding success. In addition, it plays an important role in safeguarding the future of the group, for groups that fail to breed decline in size and their ranges are taken over by larger neighboring groups. The meerkats' exciting and unusual behavior inspired the Animal Planet television series Meerkat Manor, which closely follows the daily adventures of the Whiskers, one of the meerkat families struggling to survive in the South African desert.

Tim Clutton-Brock is currently the Prince Philip Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and co-founder and vice-president of the Tropical Biology Association, a federation of European universities and non-governmental organizations that runs field courses in ecology and conservation biology for African, European and Asian students.