Innovative problem solving in wild meerkats Alex Thornton a, * , Jamie Samson b a Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K. b Kalahari Meerkat Project, Kuruman River Reserve, Van Zylsrus, South Africa article info Article history: Received 28 October 2011 Initial acceptance 20 December 2011 Final acceptance 22 February 2012 Available online 13 April 2012 MS. number: 11-00870 Keywords: cognition inhibitory control innovation learning meerkat Suricata suricatta Behavioural innovations may have far-reaching evolutionary and ecological consequences, allowing individuals to obtain new resources and cope with environmental change. However, as innovations are rarely observed in nature, their emergence is poorly understood. What drives individuals to innovate, and what psychological mechanisms allow them to do so? We used three novel food extraction tasks to address these questions in groups of wild meerkats, Suricata suricatta. Innovatory tendencies were unrelated to body condition and foraging success, but were affected by age, rank and sex. Juvenile individuals were most likely to interact with tasks, but seldom solved them, perhaps owing to their small size or lack of dexterity. Instead, adult subordinates made up the bulk of the innovators. In cooperatively breeding societies, the inability of subordinate helpers to compete physically with dominant breeders may drive them to seek out solutions to novel problems. Most innovators were males, which, as the dispersing sex, may be particularly prone to solve novel problems, and innovators virtually always persisted longer than other group members when interacting with tasks. Most successful individuals solved tasks more than once, and learned to inhibit ineffective prepotent responses across successive presentations of the same task. They did not learn to manipulate functional parts of the apparatus more efficiently, however, nor did they extract general rules allowing them to solve novel tasks faster. Contrary to recent suggestions that innovation may be cognitively demanding, these results suggest that simple, conserved learning processes and dogged perseverance may suffice to generate solutions to novel problems. Ó 2012 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Innovation is a process that generates a novel learned behaviour in an individual (Ramsey et al. 2007; see also Reader & Laland 2003). It may allow animals to exploit new resources, cope with environmental change and invade new niches, and may lead to the spread of adaptive information through groups, forming local traditions (Reader & Laland 2003; Sol et al. 2005; Ramsey et al. 2007). However, despite these important implications, the factors that lead certain individuals to innovate remain unclear. Following the adage ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ innovative tendencies may often be inversely related to competitive ability. Innovation necessarily involves costs, including potentially wasted time and energy and exposure to danger. Consequently, individuals that cannot physically outcompete others may be particularly likely to take the risks of developing solutions to novel problems (Reader & Laland 2003). This suggestion has considerable empirical support from work on fish (Laland & Reader 1999a, b), birds (Katzir 1982; Biondi et al. 2010; Morand-Ferron et al. 2011; Cole & Quinn 2012) and primates (Reader & Laland 2001; Kendal et al. 2005), in which young or low-ranking individuals tend to show high innovatory propensities. However, other studies have produced conflicting results (Boogert et al. 2006; Gajdon et al. 2006; Bouchard et al. 2007). Indeed, in some species it may be that some individuals may achieve high rank and competitive ability precisely by virtue of being innovative. For example, Goodall (1986) reported that a young male chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, attained alpha status through the innovative use of empty cans to augment his threat displays. Further work is clearly necessary to understand the relationship between competitive abilities and innovatory tenden- cies across different taxa and social systems. Cooperative breeders may prove particularly useful study systems as they often show extreme variation in competitive abilities, with a single dominant pair monopolizing reproduction while subordinates help raise the dominants’ offspring (Hauber & Lacey 2005; Clutton-Brock et al. 2006). As well as reflecting differences in competitive abilities across factors such as age, rank and sex, innovative tendencies may differ between individuals within these broad categories. For instance, innovation may be associated with short-term hunger (Laland & Reader 1999a) or, over the longer term, with stable differences in * Correspondence: A. Thornton, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EB, U.K. E-mail address: jant2@cam.ac.uk (A. Thornton). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Animal Behaviour journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/anbehav 0003-3472/$38.00 Ó 2012 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2012.03.018 Animal Behaviour 83 (2012) 1459e1468