Getting into strange habitats
Peter Quennell
MONGOOSE WATCH: A FAMILY OBSERVED by Anne Rasa John Murray, £10.95 Since the beginning of the century, there have been many changes in methods of zoological research. No longer content to observe their subjects from behind bars or through a pair of field-glasses, zoologists now draw as close as they can to a species and, instead of studying its general charac- teristics alone, develop a keen, sometimes an almost romantic, interest in the doings and social relationships of a separate com- munity that they have followed to the wilds.
Recently, for example, a courageous young Englishwoman more or less joined a group of chimpanzees, and, when she eventually married a fellow enthusiast, brought up her offspring in their midst. Meanwhile, an American academic, Pro- fessor George B. Schaller, author of The Year of the Gorilla, a delightful and amus- ing book, dogged the footsteps of a large gorilla family across their native rain- forests, and was so nearly adopted as a member of their tribe that, despite occa- sional chest-thumpings, they never chased him away, and even the tribal patriarch, a rather surly giant, only protested against his attentions by a few exasperated grunts.
Similarly, Dr Anne Rasa has devoted well over a decade to observing and affec- tionately photographing the African Dwarf Mongoose, cousin of the Indian species. Modern zoologists lead enviable lives; sup- ported by generous learned bodies, they seem very seldom short of time. Thus having first spent over six years completing her thesis on the aggressive tendencies of the Damselfish (a furious tiny black fish she had encountered swimming around a reef while she worked for her doctorate at the University of Hawaii) and watching mongooses in captivity at the famous Max Planck Institute for Behavioural Physiolo- gy, a West-German seat of learning, she travelled to Kenya to investigate the same breed under natural conditions.
Konrad Lorenz, founder of the Institute and a renowned authority on the behaviour of birds, who once, he has told us, became so closely associated with a jackdaw that it attempted to stuff him into his own waist- coat pocket, acclaims Mongoose Watch in his erudite foreward as a 'masterpiece of observation and descriptive writing'. Altogether the authoress passed some 15 years investigating every aspect of the mongooses' domestic world; and the re- sult, though here and there perhaps a little repetitive — the adventures and misadven- tures of a mongoose colony do not vary much from day to day — is for the most part highly readable.
The background of her studies was the Kenyan Taru Desert, a wild region where a multitude of animals roam; and on one occasion a pride of lions surrounded her tent and remained 'roaring and coughing' all night, until dawn broke and they silently strolled away. Dealing with the mongooses themselves — small, elegant carnivorous animals about the size of a big stoat or ferret — she needed of course not physical courage, but unending tact and patience, before she was accepted as a harmless neighbour.
Mongooses have a curious habitat — the ventilation shafts of a termites' mound, which the invisible insects construct to maintain a constant temperature in the fungus gardens that supply the vitamins they need. The mongoose colonists always lodge there after dark, but move repeated- ly from mound to mound; and Anne Rasa gives us a vivid account of how she first watched them emerging to begin the day's hunt, each, with the help of cheek and anal scent-glands, carefully 'marking', in other words leaving their signatures on some convenient root or twig.
The colony, so far as she could make out, included some 20 individuals; and they had two leaders, a matriarchal female and a prince consort, who dominated, and if necessary, disciplined, the younger mem- bers of the group. But, in their family life, they often showed affection, greeting a friend by nibbling the nape of the neck, grooming his or her coat, and playing long, elaborate games. A favourite game is prettily illustrated — it is one of 66 excellent photographs, six coloured — on the cover of this book. The players would stand upright, their roseate noses gently touching, their forepaws round one anothers' shoulders, and slowly circle as though to the music of a waltz. They also enjoyed far rowdier games, chasing, grap- pling and rolling around in the intervals of serious business.
Anne Rasa very soon decided that Dwarf Mongooses were the most fascinat- ing creatures she had yet observed, and, simultaneously, that they had 'managed to survive through developing one of the most complicated social systems known amongst mammals . .' In the mongoose-society, every individual has, and conscientiously executes, a separate civic task. There are guards who sit erect on the mounds and loudly signal the approach of a dangerous predator, a serpent or a questing eagle; hunters, soldiers, `baby-sitters'; and all exactly understand their functions. Moreover, they have learned to co-operate with other inhabitants of their native de- sert; a pair of hornbills regularly accompa- nied the group that Anne Rasa watched upon their daily hunt.
The anthropomorphic interpretation of animal conduct, however, may at certain moments go a little too far. The authoress gives her subjects human names, which enable her to distinguish between their varying attributes; but when, chronicling the sexual relationships of the group, she writes that 'Edward's arrival . . . must have sent a feminine flutter' through a female mongoose, she may exasperate the reader. Nor, I think, is he likely to agree— true, this statement appears only on the dust-cover — that the mongooses owe their survival to 'an impressively successful sys- tem of social birth-control'.
The facts, as Anne Rasa sets them forth elsewhere, are obviously rather different. Of the whole group, the matriarch and her consort alone are permitted to bring up their young. Those of their subordinates never emerge from the mound, where they are presumably killed and, it may be, eaten; and birth-control and infanticide, perhaps complicated by cannibalism, are luckily not at all the same thing.
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