It's naturally cute, no wonder "Ball 2" also gave it a special shot

The Wandering Earth 2 movie

After the space station crashed

Several small animals stood up

Watching the falling space station

Image source: Movie screenshot

They are Timon from The Lion King

The representative of the cute world - meerkats

Image source: Baidu Encyclopedia

Meerkats are also called slender-tailed mongooses, sun cats, mongooses, gray meerkats, meerkats, gray-clawed meerkats, sea cats, and island mongooses. They are distributed in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, mainly in Angola, Namibia, and Botswana.

Its coat is usually light yellow-brown with gray, bronze or slightly silvery brown, with short parallel stripes across its back, extending from the base of the tail to the shoulders, and the stripes are different for each individual. When they stand, they use the black area on their abdomen to absorb the heat of the sun.

Image source: Shenzhen Wildlife Park

There are clusters of black hair around the meerkats' eyes and ears. Don't underestimate these black hairs, as they are the meerkats' unique magic weapon.

When meerkats are digging holes, the hair around their ears not only blocks dust and dirt from entering their ears, but also acts like a sponge on a microphone, collecting sound and reducing noise. This greatly enhances the meerkats' hearing and enables them to detect potential dangers from all directions earlier.

Image source: Shenzhen Wildlife Park

The "dark circles" around their eyes are similar to human sunglasses, which can block strong light and even allow meerkats to look directly into the sun without burning their eyeballs. This can help meerkats detect predators from the air in advance and avoid danger.

In The Lion King, Timon takes Simba to find strange insects as food. In nature, meerkats do feed on insects, but their diet also includes more "poisonous" delicacies - scorpions, venomous snakes, spiders. To be precise, meerkats are real "poison killers"!

In the process of hunting for tens of millions of years, meerkats have evolved a system of immune toxins. The molecular structure of its acetylcholine receptors is different from that of other mammals and is more similar to that of snakes. The neurotoxins in snake venom can attach to choline receptors and block signals from nerves, so meerkats are immune to snake venom.

Image source: Shiye Natural History Museum

Today

This system has been upgraded

This makes meerkats a powerful enemy of various poisonous creatures.

They can remain calm

Swallow the scorpion's tail venom sac

Not even afraid of the poisonous stings

Meerkats are highly social animals that live together in groups of 30 or 40 individuals. They dig a huge burrow similar to a human apartment, with many entrances and exits. Meerkats live in harmony with each other, with clear division of labor.

The sociality of meerkats is closer to a matriarchal society, that is, they have one mother and no fixed father.

Image source: The Paper

Each meerkat population is generally composed of 2 to 50 meerkats, and the internal rulers are the male leader and the female leader, with the male leader being elected by the female leader.

Female leaders will normally kill all the cubs that are not their own to ensure that their offspring have the best chance of survival. They will also exile or kill the mothers who give birth to cubs that offend them. Therefore, most meerkats in the same group are all the queen's siblings or children.

When the troops go out to forage for food

There will always be a number of individuals

Actively serve as sentinel

Beware of dangers

If they find their predators

Will shout to alert companions

The entire group will quickly hide in the burrow.

Image source: New Discovery Magazine

"When they're foraging, they're constantly making these calls, just to let everyone know, 'I'm here, everything's fine, there's no predators around,'" said Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge in the UK, who has been studying the animals' vocal communication and using algorithms to analyze and compare their calls. "By constantly making these soft calls, they can keep in touch with each other."

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Source: China Science Expo, Science Popularization China, Shenzhen Zoo, etc.

Compiled by: Dong Xiaoxian

Editor: Guru