I truncated B’s teacher intensive morning work so that we could all go outside at 11, we skipped morning snack because we had slept in and breakfast was late. K skipped her morning nap, so to keep things cheery, we drove to the zoo and play ground at Capron Park, it’s only 6 blocks away, but with only an hour until lunch with Daddy, I used the car.
M loves animals but he was much more interested in the playground, so we chose just three favorite animals to look at before the playground. We have a membership, so I don’t worry that our short visits don’t cover the whole zoo. We can always come back. I was very pleased with our compromise, little did I know…
In the Africa house, the lion cub, soon to be relocated to another zoo (that doesn’t already have a male) has grown to fluid, lethal grace. He even pounced on the plexiglass in front of M. What muscles! Down at the end of the building, some ladies we’d never seen before were in and out of the meerkat section, with a pneumatic pump and a metal box. Always curious, we asked what they were doing.
They were absorbed in watching one lady hold a screw driver for the meerkats to bite. Huh?
Turns out; they were training the meerkats to bite a meter on their box so that they could measure the force of their bite. Once a bite on the upper black protrusions, some paste of boiled egg and water oozed out of the botom slot. If they can work out the meerkat adaptations for their prototype, they hope to win a grant from the national science foundation to go to South Africa to study the meerkats on meerkat manor, like the TV show. The Capron Meerkats are a lot closer to UMass than the Namib Desert though. They want to know if there is a correlation between winning mates and having a strong bite, and if juvaniles bites are as strong as adults, and how much force does take to crunch a scorpion. One of the ladies, Jaime Tanner, had used a similar machine to study hyenas.
The meerkats were not exatly cooperative; they rocked the box, tipped it together to spill the paste out without biting anything; they boxed the mechanism with their paws; and they tried to dig under it. K wanted the ladies to hold her (not much stranger anxiety anymore in that girl.) B engaged them in many questions. After making sure they didn’t mind, I followed K and M out to the little sandbox in between the Africa house and the nocturnal house. When I checked back they were all discussing (including B) how to adapt the mechanism since the Meerkats are used to digging for their food, and seem to think up is paws territory, down is teeth.
After all this discussion M only got about 5 min at the playground. I’ll try to get them back there this afternoon after nap time and before the zoo closes at 4PM. M wants to climb stuff, B wants to know if the Meerkats are biting where they are supposed to yet.
If anyone from the National Science Foundation reads my blog, these researchers very winsomely taught my children about biology and engineering today. Does that give them any points towards their grant?
We did make it to the zoo in time. Two Meerkats learned how to work the box. They are going alter the design though. They are coming back to the zoo, I hope we see them again.
The photo on Dr Tanner's homepage is with an anesthetized hyena.
-Christine