Mammals
Banded Mongoose
Mungos mungo · also called banded mongoose
The banded mongoose is a small, grizzled carnivore of the African savanna that lives its whole life in a crowd. Packs of a dozen to forty forage, sleep, and fight together, raise all their pups in one communal nursery, gang up to kill cobras, and wage lethal wars against neighbouring groups.
Overview
Banded mongooses live across most of sub-Saharan Africa in savanna, woodland, and grassland with cover. They are 30–45 cm in head and body, 1.5–2.5 kg, grey-brown with a set of dark bands across the back. They den in old termite mounds, move every few days, and forage by day as a scattered, chattering band, digging for beetles, larvae, and millipedes.
One nursery for the whole group
Almost all the breeding females give birth on the same night, so the pups are identical in age and cannot be told apart. Pooled in one den and nursed indiscriminately, the litters are effectively protected from the infanticide common in other social mammals. Once the pups emerge, each is assigned an adult escort — usually an unrelated male — that carries, feeds, and guards it.
Mobbing and war
Against a jackal, eagle, or snake, the group forms a churning, growling mass that advances as one, and packs will collectively kill spitting cobras and puff adders. Between groups, banded mongooses fight pitched territorial battles that can leave adults dead — and females sometimes start these fights, then slip away to mate with rival males.
Status
The banded mongoose is Least Concern, common and widespread, and comfortable around farmland and safari lodges.
Banded Mongoose: common questions
What is the difference between a banded mongoose and a meerkat?
They are separate species in the mongoose family and differ in several ways. The banded mongoose is stockier and greyer, with dark bars across its back, and it lives across a huge range of African savanna and woodland. The meerkat is slimmer, sandy-coloured, and restricted to the drier south-western parts of Africa, and it habitually stands upright on its hind legs to watch for danger, which banded mongooses rarely do. Both are highly social and both raise young cooperatively, but meerkat groups have a single dominant breeding pair that suppresses reproduction in the others, whereas in banded mongooses many females breed at once and synchronise their births.
Why do all the female banded mongooses give birth on the same night?
It is a strategy against infanticide. In many social mammals, dominant females kill the pups of subordinates to reduce competition for their own young. Banded mongoose females largely defeat this by producing all their litters within a day or so of each other and then pooling them in one communal den. Because the pups are the same age and the mothers nurse indiscriminately, no female can reliably identify and target another's offspring without risking her own, so the whole crèche is protected. Synchrony also means the pups emerge and can be escorted around as a single cohort.
Are banded mongooses dangerous to snakes, including cobras?
As a group, yes. A lone banded mongoose is not a snake specialist the way some larger mongooses are, but a pack hunting together is formidable. When the mob encounters a snake, the animals surround it, dart in and out, and harass it from all sides until it is exhausted and can be bitten and killed, and this includes venomous species such as spitting cobras and puff adders. Mongooses do have some physiological resistance to snake venom, but the main weapon here is numbers and coordination rather than immunity.
Do banded mongooses really ride on warthogs?
They do interact closely with warthogs. Banded mongooses will climb onto a resting warthog and pick ticks and other parasites off its skin, and the warthog tolerates and even seems to solicit this grooming by lying still and presenting its body. It is a genuine cleaning symbiosis that benefits both animals, the mongoose getting a meal and the warthog getting pest control, and it is one of several ways banded mongooses exploit the activity of larger animals, along with following grazing herds to catch the insects they disturb.