Offspring competition and helper associations in cooperative meerkats

In cooperatively breeding vertebrates, helpers commonly vary in how much care they provide. We investigated whether meerkat, Suricata suricatta, pups responded to variation in helper feeding rates by associating with the most productive helpers preferentially throughout the period of pup care. Helpers varied widely in how much food they provided, and pup food intake increased with the time spent in exclusive association with productive helpers. Pups spent more time following productive helpers than poor helpers, and we confirmed the causality of this finding by conducting long-term feeding experiments which increased helper productivity and showed that pups spent significantly more time with helpers whose feeding rate had been experimentally raised. Pups aggressively defended helpers from approaches by littermates, but there was no evidence that pups defended productive helpers more strongly, or that larger pups were more likely to gain exclusive access to the most productive helpers. Our results provide evidence that, by associating with particular helpers, meerkat pups can influence how much care they receive during development. These findings highlight the importance of considering the behaviour of offspring, when investigating the way care is distributed in cooperative societies.