Inside the complex and extremely violent world of warring mongooses

Banded mongooses person agelong been utilized arsenic a exemplary of carnal cooperation. Now, researchers successful Uganda are starting to get to grips with the harsh realities of their long-running and bloody battles

Life 30 January 2023

By Graham Lawton

Banded mongooses unrecorded successful colonies of betwixt 8 and 55 individuals and often commencement wars with rivals

Anup Shah/getty images

WHEN you archetypal brushwood a set of banded mongooses, your archetypal instinct is to think: “Aww! They are truthful adorable, truthful cute, truthful fluffy.” My archetypal brushwood with them was successful Queen Elizabeth National Park successful occidental Uganda, which is beauteous and heavy with wildlife.

I was nether the adept oculus of Robert Businge, 1 of the researchers connected the Banded Mongoose Research Project based there. Businge located the radical with a vigor tracker and made a peculiar call: pu-pu-pu-pu-pu. Out of the bushes tumbled 7 bundles of chirruping, inquisitive enthusiasm. He checked they were each contiguous and correct, recorded immoderate data, past told maine a fearfulness communicative astir beheadings.

The much I learned astir banded mongooses, the much I understood conscionable however deceptive appearances tin be. They are aggressively convulsive animals that wage warfare connected neighbouring groups, brutally murdering and maiming their rivals. They ruthlessly expel adjacent relatives from their radical and termination them if they won’t leave, perpetrate infanticide – sometimes against their ain offspring – and adjacent prosecute successful cannibalism. “Their full nine is built astir warmongering,” says task person Michael Cant astatine the University of Exeter, UK.

Such brutal, organised unit is antithetic successful the carnal kingdom. I had travel to the parkland to effort to spot it for myself, watching arsenic the researchers enactment mongooses connected a warfare footing with their enemies’ faeces and a Bluetooth speaker, and took drone footage to uncover caller details astir this gruesome behaviour. These experiments …