If you thought that Meerkats couldn't get any more adorable, you would be wrong, unless you've seen them interact with humans with whom they have bonded. When I first walked by their enclosure, there were two of them cuddled in the lap of the keeper, like a couple of puppies. And when I came back, she was feeding them all sorts of interesting things. For desert, they got their favorite food: worms. They were big, fat, ugly, farm-raised Nightcrawlers and she spread them all around the enclosure in order to provide additional enrichment by their searching for them. Apparently, they've learned to watch her closely, like this one is doing, so that they can find them more easily. Or maybe they anticipate her dropping one right into their mouth, which is what she did from time to time.
The two Meerkats in the Children's Zoo are the ones that had to be separated from the rest of their mob and hand-raised, when they were young, due to parenting issues. Now, they are part of the Zoo's Animal Ambassador program.
Funny thing: Flickr's compression has caused the whiskers to turn green in places on my desktop monitor. They aren't that way on the image that I uploaded. They're OK on my Macbook Pro laptop, too.
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