"Nothing distracted the meerkats from their little lives of pond staring and algae nibbiling" (ch. 92, p. 269)

He could actually be talking about both. Sometimes people go through their lives doing something about which they are singleminded. While it is true that the meerkat behavior is no instinctual, sometimes people behave like meerkats. The staring and nibbling seems not to be a particularly thoughtful behavior and indeed people often act in almost robotlike ways.