It would be quite a challenge to not be aware of the now infamous advertisements that follow our furry meerkat friends on a variety of different adventures in a bid to help you choose your insurance or energy company. However here at Vet Image Solutions we are interested in meerkats for a whole other reason, namely in a bid to use veterinary ultrasound to detect and assess pregnancy. I recently had the opportunity to interview Dr Dominic Cram, an evolutionary biologist who works with the Large Animal Research Group in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge. Dr Cram is working on The Kalahari Meerkat Project which is run by Professor Tim Clutton-Brock, and which will serve as the basis for the following articles. He specialises in studying the association between reproduction and aging, and uses meerkats in the Kalahari Desert (South Africa) as a model. Over the next couple of weeks I will be revealing the results of my interview, and explaining why veterinary ultrasound is the perfect method to study meerkats.

Dr Cram started off by admitting he was a novice when it came to veterinary ultrasound. Nevertheless, he opted to use ultrasound technology to allow pregnancy to be established at an earlier point during the meerkat gestation, and to gain more information on the pregnancy itself – being able to reveal foetal gender being the ultimate goal.

These studies were carried out using the Sonoscape S6 BW and a linear probe (L742) which although usually used for ligaments and tendons, turned out to be suitable for scanning meerkats. With high resolution and minimal penetration, this probe could easily scan for pregnancies where they existed. Dr Cram had attended one of the VIS training days, and said that this was particularly helpful when scanning in order to assess the number of foetuses present (something which he was concerned about being able to do). Utilising ultrasonography he was able to establish pregnancies at an early stage of their 10 week gestation, around 1-2 weeks, visualise small foetuses and their heartbeats and confidently assess the number present. In order to more accurately understand the difficulty facing any would-be meerkat scanners, some of these foetuses are very small measuring just 1.5mm, so the high resolution of the Sonoscape S6 BW was the perfect scanner to do the job!

That's all for this week - in the next instalment, Dr Cram discusses the advantages of using ultrasonography for his studies and what is next for him and his team. In the meantime, the Vet Image Solutions Facebook page features photographs from The Kalahari Meerkat Project, click here to view them.