fernsita

anybody else been catching this on animal planet? so far there have been two episodes of the third season and they have been great. i find myself totally addicted to these furry lil guys.

milo bloom

My wife loves it, but this has some of the worst editing I've ever seen, hands down. The first five minutes is a recap, then a few minutes of new footage, then a commercial, then a recap of the new footage they just showed before the commercial!, then a couple of minutes of new footage, then a preview of next week's episode (which, of course, will be repeated in the next recap). There has to be literally months worth of footage from those cameras running all the time, and this is the best they can come up with?

Jadzia

I started a thread about this show last year and I think I was the only poster. Nice to see more people watching it.

However, I don't think it has been as good as the first season. I still miss courageous little Shakespeare.

C00Ki3

I wish they would put these on iTunes! I missed most of season 2.

Jadzia

It was weird how they ran season 2 right after season 1, but waited a year to show season 3.

From what I have read, most of this footage was made awhile ago and they just need to edit it into a cohesive storyline.

gjamesm

Get the dvds.

btlives

I thinks its as good as the 1st season.
You can tell how they try to make
Mitch look like the courageous one now.

Also new diggs, Mozart & Carlos new
little clan. But I am with ya...
I think everyone loved Shakespeare.

Now where is Flower?

fernsita

I just love them all. They are so cute and their social interactions are so fascinating to me. I am enjoying the third season so far and glad to have it back.

And for anyone else addicted to anything meerkat like myself (hehe) I found this fun lil catch the pups game on the official website:
http://animal.discovery.com/fansites...catchpups.html

spammied

I caught a few min. last nite, and had a hard time keeping the names of the meerkats straight. Mozart & Carlos started a family, Carlos and another one started a family.He sure gets around...Flower was mentioned last nite. Those cute little furballs look alike. How do you tell one from the other. This is the first time I've heard of the show, and it seems its been on awhile now.

Mordred

The wife and I started watched the first two seasons but cancelled our season pass after that. Besides the constant recaps (as was mentioned) the show tries WAY too hard with the drama.

"Oh no, the Lazuli are coming. This will be a deadly encounter!" Next episode everyone is fine. "Someone has gone into the den, will the pups be killed?" Nope, they're fine too.

When someone finally did die, it was kind of a shock because nothing bad ever seemed to happen despite the dire warnings. In the first season, I particularly liked when one of them (Shakespeare?) got bitten by a snake, and was injected with "enough venom to kill a human!!" A 10 pound meerkat however, got sick for a few days, and limped around for another few weeks.

grundle

Actually, they weigh a lot less than that.

By the way, I like this show a lot too.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meerkat

The meerkat is a small diurnal herpestid (mongoose) weighing on average about 731 grams (1.61 pounds) for males and 720 grams (1.58 pounds) for females.

fernsita

for those watching, don't forget the third episode of the new season is on tonight.

fernsita

did anyone watch on friday? it was a good episode, but sooo sad!


they have clips up for the next episode on the official site:
http://animal.discovery.com/fansites...t/meerkat.html

looks to be another good one.

MrX

Poor Flower

cerulean

So sad! There have been a lot of deaths in the past few episodes.

But it looks like Flower will get her own movie next year.

Jadzia

What happened?

I dropped the show because they kept showing all these splinter groups and I got bored with it.

MrX

She was bit in the head by a cobra that had gone into the den where her pups were.

You can watch the episode at animals planet's website. I read the producers buried her and marked her grave.

PrincessT

I wondered if they would leave her for the desert or bury her, I'm glad they buried her.

milo bloom

This one really hurt. You know they can die, this isn't scripted, but you just think the one's like Flower are a little luckier than the rest, and will live just a little bit longer than the others...

I really felt this one, rest in peace Flower.

grundle

http://animal.discovery.com/fansites...script_06.html

fcooke: How was it determined that The Whiskers would be followed rather than one of the other groups?

Mick Kaczorowski: It was all based on the successful leadership of Flower, because she'd been the most successful meerkat so far when we started filming. When we went to the people that are performing the research in the Kalahari, we asked them what meerkat group we should follow first. They said "Whiskers," because of Flower.

grundle

Here's a great article from about a year ago. I agree with the writer - this is also exactly how I discovered the show, and how my opinion of it got better and better the more I watched it:


http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/10/20/051054.php

TV Review: Meerkat Manor - A Guilty Pleasure On Animal Planet

Written by Jet in Columbus

Published October 20, 2006

It starts out the usual way; you’re bored out of your mind and so you go channel surfing. That’s how I found The Crocodile Hunter on Animal Planet and The Dog Whisperer on National Geographic. At first, Meerkat Manor was just one of those shows I would flip to when commercials were on whatever else I was watching and then, without realizing it, I got hooked.

I think what’s refreshing about this show is that it’s absolutely real, unvarnished, and unstaged. There are no humans (except for unseen narrator Sean "Rudy" Astin), no human interference or contact and no script. By using dozens of automated cameras, including fiber-optic ones in the underground dens, Cambridge University has been able to follow the lives of a “mob” of meerkats for over ten years. Animal Planet has managed to present the drama/comedy of the lives of this mob of about forty critters called "the Whiskers" clan and keep it equally as genuine as it is entertaining.

Not an easy feat on TV these days.

A meerkat is a member of the mongoose family and stands only about twelve inches tall and weighs maybe two pounds - if that. They set up a territory with several well-placed underground burrows where they sleep and raise their young, wandering from den to den as the mood or necessity strikes them.

A mob is ruled by a dominant female, much like in a beehive, but a meerkat female is a true hands-on leader, guiding foraging expeditions and personally fronting fights to keep control of her ground from rival mobs.

In this case, the leader is a tough woman named Flower, who despite her name, rules her domain with an iron hand. The dominant female is the only one allowed to mate and produce pups. That doesn’t mean her husband Zaphod is exactly a wimp. As on a chessboard, the queen has all the power, but the king, in the end, is just as important to the outcome. A tracking collar around Flower’s neck monitors her movements in the game.

I will warn you, though, that as ridiculous as this sounds to those who haven’t seen this program yet, their story is incredibly addictive. Because of the way they stand up while on guard and look around, it’s nearly impossible not to give them human emotions. Meerkats have a fascinating society where all the members look out for each other. They fight, they love, they nurture, and their story is nakedly presented, with all the sex, violence, deaths, births, and conflicts presented for us to see.

On daily trips looking for food, guards stand balanced on their hind legs and tail tripod-fashion watching out for predators on the ground and especially in the air so the others can eat in peace. When Flower leads her gang out, others dutifully and unselfishly stay behind to guard her pups back at the burrow against predators.

They are incredibly dedicated to each other’s safety, to the point of risking (and, in some cases, giving) their lives for the others' survival. Family dedication even extends to the other females lactating so that Flower’s pups will be fed by multiple sources.

Meerkats don’t do well on their own because their very survival depends on lookouts being constantly vigilant while the others dig deep into the ground for their meals of worms, lizards, and the occasional fat millipede. Desert storms wreak havoc; birds of prey are a constant threat to the pups and occasionally to the adult meerkats themselves. Their health also depends on constant grooming by their fellow family members to guard against ticks and other parasites (which conveniently make for tasty treats).

Keeping control of about three square miles of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa is not an easy task. When food is scarce during droughts, rival gangs (in this case, the Lazulis and the Commandos), can be downright deadly. In one recent episode, Flower’s spotters glimpsed a bird of prey while they were foraging near a Lazuli border and they all scrambled into the nearest scattered collection of holes for cover.

Flower, her pups, and six of her family thought they were safe after the bird gave up and left. As they all climbed out into daylight, the Lazuli returned to what turns out to be their den. As Flower and the others retreat back into the hole, the rival gang pounces in overwhelming numbers to reclaim it. We are left wondering if she and her young pups (on their first feeding trip) will survive as the Lazuli began feverishly digging her out in clouds of flying sand.

Then there’s the soap opera side of the story, including kidnappings by rival gangs, fights over food, births, deaths, and dangerous weather.

Flower’s dominant male is Zaphod. Her ex is his brother Youssarian, who still lives semi-peacefully with the mob. The adolescent males will leave the group on occasion to find a roving or ejected female from another mob to start their own family, or just to mate with and return home the next day.

Other characters include Casanova Carlos, a roving male from the Lazuli whose sole purpose in life seems to be to mate with as many females as he can find, regardless of affiliation, and then heartlessly leave them.

Flower’s daughter Mozart was one of Carlos' victims and recently went against Flower's rules for the second time and got pregnant. As before, she was kicked out of the family. In the freezing desert night, with no family to huddle with for warmth or to scavenge for food, her health deteriorated fast and she lost her litter of pups. She has currently been trying to find a way back into her mother’s good graces in order to rejoin her family, but knows if she doesn’t choose her time just right, she could receive a vicious beating and permanent banishment.

One of my favorites of the group, Shakespeare, was guarding the pups back at the den when the Lazuli attacked. Though having been bitten by a puff adder weeks before, and all alone to guard them, he faced down overwhelming odds.

The season cliffhanger proved a disappointment for us Shakespeare fans because the first episode of the current season showed that the pups survived, but Shakespeare was never heard from again, and no mention or explanation has yet been made as to what happened to him.

While I love this program and make it a point to watch it every Friday on Animal Planet (8PM eastern), I do have one problem with it. It’s presented in two back-to-back half-hour episodes. A lot of time is wasted at the beginning of each and every program repeatedly explaining how Cambridge University has been studying them. At the end of that episode, previews are given for the following one to air in only a few minutes, and the second episode wastes more time again on the CU commercial, needlessly recapping the episode we saw just moments before.

I think they would be better off following The Dog Whisperer’s lead and changing to an hour-long format instead of two half hour programs.

I will warn you again that if you watch even one episode, you will become addicted.

grundle

And here's a great article about Flower's life and death:


http://pundita.blogspot.com/2007/09/...rite-rose.html

Saturday, September 29, 2007

"The desert has lost its favorite rose"

Flower is dead. She died as she lived, as a great leader and a great warrior. She was cut down, not by a warrior from another tribe but from wounds she received while battling a poisonous snake. It was a battle she fought to defend her newborns and tribe, when cramped quarters meant that only one in the tribe could go after the snake.

I am sure that millions of people from around the globe join me in mourning her death. Yet I cannot feel anguish at Flower's passing because she lived her life so well, so completely. She perfectly fulfilled her potential. Death, for such ones, is a grand passage.

Flower represents the mystery of good leadership. Those who would accuse me of anthropomorphizing her have not watched the Meerkat Manor documentary during the three seasons it has run. Truly, there are many human traits in meerkats -- and many meerkat traits in humans. So one can study leadership in human affairs by observing Flower in her roles as tribal leader and general.

Many times one could watch her deliberating and making fast calculations when a threat to the tribe quickly materialized. She knew when to be ruthless for the sake of the tribe, and when to be compassionate. She made few mistakes. She knew when to act boldly, when to retreat, and when to act in conservative fashion.

One of her last acts was to allow her tribe to adopt a baby meerkat who had been abandoned by an enemy tribe -- a very unusual act for a meerkat. But there was no need to kill the baby. There was a time of plenty in the Kalahari desert, so the baby would not be competing for precious resources with other members of the tribe. One could see Flower reaching the reasonable decision after she observed that the baby was well received by the tribe.

The documentary did not show her formative months, nor did it show her parents. We met Flower when she was a mature leader. So one might speculate that she had a good role model. Yet the documentary showed leaders of other meerkat tribes. Some were smart, very brave, cunning -- but they lacked that ineffable quality we call nobility, and which Flower possessed.

I will miss her, and I appreciated the tribute that the documentary producers gave her. ("The desert has lost its favorite rose.") And yet thinking of Flower's life makes me recall that I am happy to be alive, to be able to witness the triumphs of those who work hard to deserve triumph.

I am grateful to the scientists and film crews who spent years painstakingly studying the meerkat tribes of the Kalahari and recording their lives. I am grateful to Animal Planet TV for producing Meerkat Manor.

And I am grateful I learned about such a splendid being, who made her tribe into the most formidable meerkat tribe in the Kalahari, who stood no more than 12 inches tall and died a hero's death.

grundle

http://animal.discovery.com/fansites...script_03.html

ASK: What is the expected life of a meerkat?

Mick Kaczorowski: It depends. The meerkats that survive the longest are the dominant females. So if you're a dominant female you have the protection of your male and you're basically calling the shots. And so a dominant female could possibly live to almost 11 years old, but that's rare. Between 6 and 11 is the life span of a meerkat, if things go well.

.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...=la-entnews-tv

Flower Whiskers (2000-2007)

MrX

6

grundle

Here are those funny commercials that have been on recently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blcpg8tUXu8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzwgGaLaju4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0jeQVHDjgs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKJNw_dsUZE