Long-term movements and home range changes: rapid territory shifts in meerkats

1. Territoriality and stable home ranges are a common space use pattern among animals. These ranges provide its inhabitants with important resources and thus favourable territories are associated with an increased fitness. While the role of territory quality and changes of territory ownership have often been investigated, the changes of territorial boundaries have been less studied.

2. Here we investigated space use changes in a social mammal species, applying a novel analytical approach, calculating long-term dissimilarity in space use using distance matrices based on periodic utilization distributions. This approach makes it possible to identify different space use patterns, which cannot be distinguished by only considering changes between consecutive time periods.

3. We analysed meerkat (Suricata suricatta) movements of a total of 24 different groups over a 16-year period, resulting in 134 group years. We then correlated the identified home range changes to life history events ...