In a banded mongoose group, several females breed at once and, in the Ugandan study populations, commonly give birth on the same night. Pups are pooled in a single den and nursed by any lactating female, so maternity is effectively obscured. Where synchrony breaks down, females giving birth early lose more pups, consistent with infanticide being deterred by uncertainty about parentage.
Once pups leave the den, the system changes shape. Each pup forms an exclusive one-to-one bond with a particular adult, called an escort, which feeds it, carries it and shields it while the group forages. Escorts are not necessarily the pup's parent, and the pairing lasts for weeks.
Banded mongooses also do something rare among mammals: they mount organised inter-group fights in which lines of adults meet and engage, and researchers have found that females can initiate these encounters and mate with males from the rival group during the chaos, at real cost to their own group's males. How widespread this is beyond the intensively studied Ugandan population is unknown, and behaviour at one long-term site should not be assumed species-typical.