Colours of Wildlife: Meller's Mongoose
Created | Updated Feb 3, 2019
Meller's Mongoose
Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"
I'm busy with a project for the University of Venda (not far from where I live; it's the northernmost university in South Africa). This is about informing locals about the small carnivores that live in the area. I'm creating pictures and diagrams and things for posters and other kinds of educational materials. So here's one of the small carnivores I'm working on. It's called Meller's Mongoose, and it is a rare and little-known species.
The scientific name of this species, Rhynchogale melleri, means 'Meller's nose-weasel'. This mongoose has a rather funny, bulbous nose, but more interestingly, it has a swollen-looking, wide upper lip lacking the split down the middle that is present in almost all other carnivorans. Why this is, nobody knows! Apart from this not-so-easily-seen feature, this mongoose is rather undistinguished. It is a mainly brownish mongoose, with medium-long legs, and a bushy tail. There is a tract of reversed fur along its neck, forming a ruff where it meets the cheek fur – again not the easiest thing to see. Its tail can be brown, black or white, in the latter case making confusion possible with the white-tailed mongoose. That one is mostly much larger and visibly longer-legged. Meller's mongoose reaches 80-90cm/32"-36" in total length, and a bodyweight of 3.1 kg/6.8 lbs (about the size of a small-to-average cat).
This mongoose has a limited distribution. Its stronghold are the reasonably moist woodlands of south-eastern Africa, in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania. In South Africa it only occurs in the far northeast of the country. It keeps to lushly vegetated areas with trees and tall grass, but it avoids true closed-canopy forest or equatorial rainforest. The tall grass is necessary to keep it concealed from larger predators (and humans). Within its favoured habitat, Meller's mongoose still appears to occur patchily and at low density. It is one of the least frequently seen of Africa's carnivorous mammals.
Actually, this mongoose isn't really a voracious predator, at least not of other mammals. It follows a rather extreme diet: mostly termites! It prefers harvester termites, and the termites that build huge nests (up to 6 m/20' tall) in the warm savannahs and woodlands. These termites are associated with grass, and also with the grassy dung of large herbivores like elephants, rhinos and buffaloes. The little insects come out to forage on the grass and dung in the evenings, and the mongooses then come to lap them up off the ground. They're not adapted to dig and break into the termite nests themselves, like the aardvarks and pangolins are. While they do eat mostly termites, they do not do so exclusively. They'll eat other invertebrates like centipedes, and also small vertebrates like lizards, snakes and frogs. There are tiny thread-snakes that they opportunistically feed on, since the snakes feed on the termites too! They've been recorded as eating fallen fruits also. Though grass has been found in their stomachs, it's likely that this got inside them along with the termites and that they derive minimal or no nutrition from it. They don't have strong jaw muscles, and their teeth are rather small. Their cheek teeth do not have the shearing, meat-cutting surfaces that are found in more meat-eating carnivores, instead being purely shaped for grinding. It's likely that their stomach chemistry has some adaptations to deal with the rather noxious and acidic substances found in termites, but we still have very poor knowledge about this.
We know very little about the behaviour of this mongoose. It has big hollows (sinuses) in its skull, which may be sound chambers to make their calls more resonating – but we don't know what these calls are! They're solitary and strictly nocturnal. It's likely that their ranges are quite large, to contain enough termites to supply them with adequate calories. We know very little about their breeding, but their litters can number up to three pups. Here you see three youngsters accompanying their mother, caught by a camera trap in Venda!
Since we don't know much about population sizes and densities for this species, we don't really know how abundant it is, overall. It has a large range and thus might be considered reasonably safe, provided their tree-and-grass-habitats are preserved. They suffer from predation by domestic and feral dogs. I hope the camera-trap projects can gather some more useful information about them. The project aims to teach people how to identify them and this may also help us learn where they are and how many of them are there.
