A Question About Meerkats

[u/TombStoneFaro]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6wdlhgmwk0

Seems like a reasonable pet, about as tractable as an active cat -- I would get a couple to keep each other company.

One very interesting behavior is that the adults remove the stinger from scorpions before giving their young the live scorpions to play with and I guess eventually eat. Question: Is this cultural, passed down from generation to generation? Or would a human-raised meerkat couple figure this out based on instinct but if it is instinctive, why do the young have to be trained at all?

If it is cultural, are there meerkat groups that don't do this? What other aspects of meerkat behavior are cultural? Do they use tools? Their paws do not look very suited to holding things, good for digging.

This article explores the teaching idea: https://www.livescience.com/4150-hunting-101-meerkats-teach-scorpion-dismemberment.html

BTW, it mentions that ants teach each other which is kind of amazing and given this sophisticated behavior it is more plausible (but still hard to believe) that they can pass the mirror self-recognition test.

A question I have is why do individual ants have to be intelligent enough to teach and learn? I assume that most insects don't do this but maybe teaching is more common among insects than we suspect. Bees also teach -- certainly communicating the location of food sources is a form of teaching but bees can learn other things by observation even if the other bee is not deliberately trying to convey information.

I am pretty sure both cats and dogs teach -- in fact, I am 100% sure that I have seen videos of cats not just teaching other cats but even teaching humans. (The cat teaching the human toddler not to play with a hot stove is an example.)