Named for a watcher.
The xerus is a ground squirrel of Africa's open grasslands. It has no armor, no venom, no size worth mentioning, and it lives in country where almost everything that moves is faster than it is. By any fair accounting, it should not survive there. Instead it thrives, for one reason: a xerus never watches alone.
While the colony forages, sentinels stand upright and scan the horizon. The watch rotates: no one holds it alone, and no one is exempt from taking it. When a sentinel calls, the colony moves at once, with no rank to consult and no permission to wait for. The newest member's warning carries exactly the weight of the eldest's. That vigilance belongs to the whole colony.
We didn't take our name from the animal. We took it from the arrangement.