History

The first observations of banded mongooses at Mweya were made by Ernest Neal and Jon Rood starting in the late 1960s. Rood studied the Mweya mongooses for five years from the early 1970s, but had to abandon his research in 1976 as Uganda descended into chaos under Idi Amin. In the early 1990s, Daniela De Luca, an Italian graduate student, returned to Mweya to follow up on Rood’s observations. The Banded Mongoose Research Project was founded a few years later in 1995, by Michael Cant from the University of Cambridge. Since then, the project has grown into a world-leading study of social mammals, generating over 130 peer-reviewed scientific papers and helping to train a new generation of animal behaviour researchers. The Banded Mongoose Project supports a population of over 200 banded mongooses living in nine social groups.

Funding

We are funded by grants from the European Research Council, the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, and The German Research Foundation (DFG). It takes a lot of work to keep a project going for 30 years, and part of the reason why we have been successful at winning funding is that banded mongooses challenge established wisdom about how and why animal societies evolve. We are rewarded by being able to follow individuals across their entire lives and over multiple generations, finding answers to important questions. What are the consequences of getting a good start in life? Why are some individuals more cooperative than others, or more aggressive? How do conflicts within family arise and how are they resolved? Why do some animals go to war? These are questions that studies of wild animals can answer in a way that laboratory research cannot.