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A mob of meerkats at the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve in South Africa, November 2014. Photo credit: Charlesjsharp/Sharp Photography (CC BY-SA 4.0) 

For my own part, I’m a “near-surface geophysicist”, interested in the physical properties of material within the upper 100 metres of the ground – the rock, soil and (occasionally) ice located directly in the zone of human interaction – and I’ll often apply ground-penetrating radar to these targets. But there is still a lot that can happen in 100 metres: indeed, go to the right place, and even the top metre of the ground is a bustling metropolis of mammals. And that’s how I ended up investigating an underground meerkat maze for the new BBC series Animals with Cameras.

Investigating meerkats… with radar. Images: BBC, author provided
Investigating meerkats… with radar. Images: BBC, author provided

The same technique works with moles, too. Being smaller than meerkats, and living almost entirely underground, moles make a complex system of narrower feeding tunnels – but radar can even see these, despite them being just a few centimetres in diameter.

I have been using radar to monitor time-lapse changes to a mole tunnel network, together with Oxford zoologists Sandra Baker and Stephen Ellwood and geophysicist Niklas Allroggen from Germany’s Potsdam University. It is already clear that the distribution of molehills at the surface is no guaranteed indicator of the complex geometry of the tunnel. But radar sheds light on a more fundamental ecological issue: because animals only dig tunnels if they benefit from doing so, systematic changes to the burrow architecture could hint at particular behavioural patterns.

The author in the Kalahari; a radar-derived map of the meerkat burrow network. Images: Isabel Rogers, BBC, author provided; author provided graphic
The author in the Kalahari; a radar-derived map of the meerkat burrow network. Images: Isabel Rogers, BBC, author provided; author provided graphic

The same technique works with moles, too. Being smaller than meerkats, and living almost entirely underground, moles make a complex system of narrower feeding tunnels – but radar can even see these, despite them being just a few centimetres in diameter.

I have been using radar to monitor time-lapse changes to a mole tunnel network, together with Oxford zoologists Sandra Baker and Stephen Ellwood and geophysicist Niklas Allroggen from Germany’s Potsdam University. It is already clear that the distribution of molehills at the surface is no guaranteed indicator of the complex geometry of the tunnel. But radar sheds light on a more fundamental ecological issue: because animals only dig tunnels if they benefit from doing so, systematic changes to the burrow architecture could hint at particular behavioural patterns.

The author mapping mole tunnels; controlled excavation reveals a tunnel at a location consistent with radar imaging. Images: Sandra Baker, WildCRU, author provided
The author mapping mole tunnels; controlled excavation reveals a tunnel at a location consistent with radar imaging. Images: Sandra Baker, WildCRU, author provided

The ConversationApplications of geophysical methods in animal ecology are in their infancy, yet other disciplines are already benefiting from our wide experience of detailed imaging of life underground. It will be fascinating to see how widely the observations of meerkat and mole habitats are replicated – both from burrow to burrow, and in comparison with other species.

Adam Booth, Lecturer in Exploration Geophysics, University of Leeds.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.