Japanese Photographer Snaps The Cutest Shy-At-First Baby Meerkat And Its Family

Did you have a bad day? Were your co-workers or classmates being mean? Or was it particularly crowded at the store? It must have been hard for you and even if it wasn’t, we still hope to cheer your day up!

And we believe that these adorable, munchkin pictures of a baby meerkat taken by a Japanese photographer will make your day 10x better. Scroll down below!

Japanese photographer who goes by the user name mamekoro51 is based in Tokyo, Japan. The photographer loves to take pictures of adorable rodents such as squirrels and meerkats. Recently, he snapped several pictures of a baby meerkat which went so viral on Twitter because, how can it not?

This set of pictures show the baby peeking from behind a wall and consecutively slowly looking at the camera.

Meerkats are still family to mongoose and carnivores. They can be found around the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, Namibian Desert to southwestern Angola and South Africa. Did you know that a group of meerkats is referred to as a ‘mob’, ‘gang’ or ‘clan’?

They can live in a clan of up to 50 or more family members, having the live expectancy between 12-14 years in captivity or half of that in the wild. They fully mature at two years of age and can have up to four litter at once.

As for this little one, the photographer found him at Inokashira Natural Cultural Park in Musashino City, Tokyo. It is a newborn pup and they remain with their parents for at least two weeks. The female in the group can lactate to feed the alpha’s pair’s babies and protect them from dangers.

Baby meerkats learn from observing the mature ones and are actively taught by them. Despite this, meerkats can kill babies of others to improve their positions in the clan’s hierarchy.

The zoo where this adorable family was snapped is Inokashira Park Zoo which is located in a quiet suburb in Tokyo. It is also a conservation center of Japanese species such as squirrels, mandarin ducks, and swans and has a botanical garden. There is also a Japanese sculptor Museum by Seibo Kitamura.

If you are interested to visit this zoo, you can also found Asiatic elephants, rhesus monkeys, raccoons, fennecs, Japanese serows, Japanese martens, masked palm civets, Amur cats, raccoon dogs, Japanese squirrels, red-crowned cranes, Japanese birds, tropical birds, mandarin ducks, and swans.