And now we have evidence for an unusual mutual relationship—between warthogs and banded mongooses.

现在有证据表明疣猪和条纹猫鼬之间存在不同寻常的相互关系。

Everyone in the mongoose pack helps look after their pups.

猫鼬群里的每个人都帮助照顾它们的幼崽。

So any mongooses hunting for bugs can keep calm and carry on.

这样一来，找虫子的侏獴就可以保持冷静，继续找虫子。

They need time to recover before becoming fully contributing members of mongoose society.

它们需要时间恢复，然后才能成为猫鼬族群中有充分贡献的成员。

Not to say mongoose society is quite as complex as ours.

这并不是说侏獴社会像我们人类社会那样复杂。

Kern and her team observed seven different groups of wild dwarf mongooses in South Africa.

恩和团队在南非观察了七组不同的野生矮猫鼬群。

Small, tasty mammals like dwarf mongooses have one main goal: do not get eaten.

不要被吃掉。

That could do something like increase rat and mongoose populations, which are known to be nest predators of native birds.

这可能会增加老鼠和猫鼬的数量，众所周知，这两种动物是本土鸟类的巢穴掠食者。”

For example, Pallas's cats and mongooses are both small ambush predators, but the Pallas's cat has round pupils and mongooses have goat-like pupils.

例如，帕拉斯猫和猫鼬都是小型伏击捕食者，但帕拉斯猫有圆形的瞳孔，猫鼬有山羊般的瞳孔。

The study included ring-tailed lemurs, which come from large social groups, as well as lemurs from small-groups, like the mongoose lemur.

研究包括节尾狐猴，来自大社群，还有从小社群来的狐猴，比如獴狐猴。

When new immigrants shows up, that means more mongooses can act as lookout against predators. Right? In reality, it's more complicated.

当新加入的猫鼬出现时，就意味着有更多的猫鼬可以充当警戒捕食者的监视员，对吧？而事实要复杂得多。

Despite their cat-like appearance fossas are actually more closely related to  mongooses and hyenas than to cats.

尽管它们的外观像猫，但窝实际上与猫鼬和鬣狗的关系比与猫的关系更密切。

But at a very basic level - it appears mongoose society also follows the rule, You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours.

但从非常基础的层面来说，似乎侏獴社会也遵循“投桃报李”这一规则。

It wasn't until they'd been in their new groups for five months, on average, that they spent as much time working as lookout as the other mongooses did.

平均来说，它们在加入新群体五个以后，才能和其他猫鼬一样担任哨兵的工作。

In a playback study, the researchers found that mongooses responded far less to the sentinel calls of recent immigrants than to those from others they already knew and trusted.

在回放研究中，研究人员发现，与其它已经了解且信任的成员相比，猫鼬对新人哨兵呼叫的反应要少得多。