Why This Meerkat Matriarch's Survival Story is Captivating Everyone
ByCamille BromleyPhotographs byThomas PeschakPublished December 11, 2025One brisk morning last August in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert, a female meerkat weakly pulled herself from her burrow, tail dragging slowly behind. She joined her family members as they foraged for grubs, but she was too sick to eat. Nearby, carved in the auburn soil, lay a terrifying clue: the long, sinewy tracks of a puff adder. She had been bitten.Even though meerkats measure just 12 inches tall and weigh no more than two pounds, they can typically withstand snake venom potent enough to kill an adult human. Still, a large dose can be dangerous.That day, the bitten female’s fellow meerkats banded together to find extra food for her. When they returned to their burrow at night and realized she’d been left behind, they turned around, calling for her. They wouldn’t let her perish, in part because she was critical to their survival. She was the dominant female—and sole breeder—of her small clan.Living in large groups may help meerkats survive ever changing environmental conditions. Ordinarily, only one pair, the dominant female and her partner, are allowed to mate. Others in the group are tasked with rearing her young and teaching them to hunt, groom each other, and defend the clan. To ensure her pups get priority care, she may even kill rival clan mates’ offspring.Meerkats face numerous threats in the Kalahari, often from predators such as tawny eagles and black-backed jackals. But in some cases, danger lurks closer to home: In the past decade, researchers have found that as many as one in five meerkats is killed by another meerkat.(Rising heat puts the Kalahari’s ecosystem on the edge of survival.)Meerkats live in a matriarchy. They are one of only a few mammals, including spotted hyenas and lemurs, that have social structures built around female dominance. That ailing female meerkat was the one in her multigenerational extended family that birthed the babies and kept others strictly in line. As the group’s leader, she maintained social order over her clan of helpers, which embark on daily foraging trips, guard against predators, and watch over the pups. Without her, the group would struggle to both find enough food and protect itself.Matriarchs have a distinct set of advantages that help them rule. They are larger, stronger, and more aggressive than their subordinate counterparts. Over the past 10 years, research has revealed that these traits are linked to high levels of hormones like testosterone. It’s also sharpened our understanding of how the roles alpha meerkats play are more vital than ever as conditions become harsher in southern Africa, one of the world’s most rapidly changing environments.The meerkat that suffered the puff adder bite and her family live in Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, a nearly 300,000-acre wildlife preserve along the southern edge of the Kalahari Desert. During the past two and a half decades, Tswalu has been rewilded from overgrazed farmland and repopulated with herds of antelope, lions, cheetahs, and other native wildlife. The park, which has three luxury safari camps, is one of the few places in the Kalahari where meerkats have been habituated to the presence of humans and can be approached for close observation. That’s due largely to Olorato Moacwi, a 29-year-old tracker who monitors the meerkats’ movements from sunup to sundown.(Meet the animals that survive extreme desert conditions.)Meerkats typically thrive in groups of 12 to 15 adults, but the meerkat clans Moacwi follows in Tswalu are precariously small. This winter they numbered a mere five, six, and seven individuals apiece. Such low numbers make the clans more vulnerable to dying off. They have fewer members to forage, stand sentry watching for predators, and rear young. Smaller clans live on the very edge of survival, with little buffer from everyday dangers and even less from the looming existential threat of extreme heat waves and drought.Moacwi trained at South Africa’s prestigious Tracker Academy, which teaches community members to follow animals based on clues they leave behind, such as footprints or scat.Since the late 1990s, high temperatures in this part of southern Africa have skyrocketed by over two degrees Celsius—a more dramatic rise than in most places on Earth outside of the Arctic and Antarctic. The number of summer days that reach the upper 90s Fahrenheit has more than tripled. More directly threatening than heat, though, is drought, because it cuts off the meerkats’ food supply. Less rain means fewer insects, pushing the meerkats to travel farther and dig deeper in the ground in search of sustenance.Roughly 50 miles west of Tswalu lies the Kalahari Research Centre, a private ranch where biologists study the lives of thousands of meerkats and where much of the scientific knowledge of the species comes from. In 2012 and 2013, a severe drought killed off more than half the site’s meerkat population. “Droughts are really what kicks the meerkat population down,” says Tim Clutton-Brock, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge and National Geographic Explorer who founded the Kalahari Meerkat Project, which is located at the ranch.And rough stretches in the region seem to be getting longer. Today the meerkats at the site are about 10 percent smaller than they were in the 1990s. In addition, even the biggest groups now count 20-something meerkats, while before the drought they numbered in the 30s and 40s.A meerkat sneaks up on an unsuspecting katydid. Over 80 percent of a meerkat’s diet consists of insects like butterflies, moths, beetles, and caterpillars, and even arachnids like scorpions.Locked in the jaws of a hungry meerkat, a legless skink meets a grisly end. The mammals use their sharp, piercing teeth to puncture their prey.In an average year a fifth of the meerkats might die from predation or disease. Although meerkats have developed some resistance to snake venom, it can still be lethal in high doses. This meerkat was likely bitten by a snake and slowly succumbed to the venom.Meerkats are skilled diggers and use their long, nonretractable claws to root around the soil for food or construct networks of underground tunnels. As they seek refuge from Africa’s soaring temperatures, they frequently co-opt the burrows of other animals, such as yellow mongooses or Cape ground squirrels.The extreme hardships brought on by climate change can make a meerkat matriarch resort to brutal survival tactics. Earlier in the winter, Moacwi noticed that two meerkats in one of the clans she was following were pregnant at the same time. When food is scarce, a pregnant matriarch will prioritize her own pups—and put her considerable physical advantage to use. When the subordinate gave birth, the dominant female savagely attacked the other meerkat mother, nearly ripping off her lower jaw, and killed the newborn pups. She then threw the subordinate out of the clan. For a month, the exiled female haunted the edges of the group, foraging and sleeping alone. Only after the dominant female’s own pups were born was the exiled female allowed back into the family.That level of viciousness by a meerkat matriarch may seem extreme, but it can work in the group’s favor. Christine Drea, a behavioral ecologist at Duke University, and her team discovered in recent years that a dominant female’s testosterone levels nearly double during pregnancy. The matriarch uses that surge of strength and aggression against anything that might threaten the survival of her pups and, by extension, the clan’s future—like a food shortage brought on by long droughts and brutally high temps. “The nastiest female is the one that will have the most surviving offspring,” Drea says.Meerkat matriarchs like that one hold the keys to the species’ resilience. Meerkats’ sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive social structures let them adjust and adapt, even in the face of insect shortages and unrelenting droughts. “The meerkats recover very well,” Moacwi says. At winter’s end, the largest clan she tracks welcomed two litters of pups, doubling the group’s count to 14. As for the matriarch that had been bitten by the puff adder, she pulled through, thanks to the help of her family. Moacwi saw her a few weeks later, back in charge—and pregnant.Two meerkats tussle while foraging. Dominant meerkats harshly discipline subordinates that challenge their authority and may subject their rivals to a grueling array of punishments: depriving them of food, expelling them from the group, or even attacking them.Climate change has imperiled meerkats’ future. Steadily increasing temperatures and changes in rainfall could upend their feeding and breeding habits and, subsequently, the population’s ability to adapt to the dynamic environment. Under the matriarch’s careful and unrelenting leadership, the group stands a fighting chance.A version of this story appears in the January 2026 issue of National Geographic magazine.
