If deaths really do come in threes, famous animals must be very nervous right now.

On September 26th, Alex, a 31-year-old gray parrot with an impressive vocabulary and cognitive skills better than some people I've met, died of unknown causes. He was the subject of decades of research into avian language abilities and could distinguish between colors, shapes and numbers. He even seemed to understand the concept of "zero."

And about two weeks ago, Flower, the matriarch of the Whiskers family and star of Animal Planet's "Meerkat Manor," was killed by a cobra near her Kalahari desert home.  The various clan rivalries and interpersonal conflicts on the Manor would do any soap opera proud, and Flower's death hit the show's fan base hard. A memorial online forum has over 5000 posts as of this writing. Discovery Films' theatrical feature, Flower: Queen of the Meerkats, hits theaters in 2008; it likely represents the first meerkat biopic in the history of the universe.

One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. But a fallen meerkat rocks the entire Animal Planet.