Prairie Dogs: They’re onto your game Posted on 2013 June 5 | Leave a comment Rate This Con Slobodchikoff, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences of Northern Arizona University, knows a lot about prairie dogs. Slobodchikoff, who earned both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from UC Berkeley, is a specialist in animal communication, and with his students he’s been paying close attention to the small critters familiar to any Boomer who grew up in the Midwest or Rocky Mountain states. What he’s discovered is simply amazing: Prairie dogs have a language all their own, and they’‘ tell eacch other when you or I appear on their turf, and will let their fellow critters know if we’re thin or fat, and what color our clothing is. Sound amazing? Well, it is. And here’s Slobodchikoff in a fascinating brief video to explain it to us: From the program notes: This program discusses Prairie Dog Language — the most sophisticated animal language decoded so far. Con Slobodchikoff, Ph.D., and his students at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, researched the Gunnison’s prairie dogs Alarm Calls for over 30 years to decode their language. Sonograms of all 5 species of prairie dogs suggest that they would not understand each other and each species has their own language. Each species also has Regional and Local Dialects. There are 5 species of prairie dogs; the Black-tailed prairie dogs and the Mexican prairie dogs are the black-tailed group who have black tail tips, and the Gunnison’s prairie dogs, the White-tailed prairie dogs, and the Utah prairie dogs are the white-tailed group who have white tail tips. All prairie dogs live in the grasslands of western central North America, and all are social. They live in relative harmony within their social groups. All of the species are similar in their social behavior, although the black-tails are somewhat more social than the white-tails. Learn about a type of hibernation called Torpor that prairie dogs employ. See pups before they emerge from their natal burrows as well as in different stages of life (an average prairie dog lives 3-4 years), rare above ground mating, a lot of greet-kissing, territorial behavior from fighting and aggressive chases to social structure based on plant food sources on each territory, mutual grooming, and prairie dog personalities! Prairie dogs are considered Keystone Species of their grassland ecosystems — some 200 vertebrate species and a number of invertebrate species of animals depend on them for food or for their burrows. Prairie dogs survive in 1-2% of their historic range of habitat. Their numbers have declined drastically over the past 100 years to 1-2% of the number of animals there were historically. Agriculture, land development, target shooting and disease are the primary reasons for their continuing decline. There are more videos at his vlog. Growing up in Kansas and Colorado, we saw lots of prairie dogs, and picked up the notion that they were noxious, fast-breeding critters and notorious because expensive livestock often broke their legs when their hooves fell into the entrances to prairie dog dens. In another video, Slobodchikoff debunks many of the myths which have led to the slaughter of most of the critters. And as for that fast-reproduction myth, femals of the species can only breed for one five-hour period a year, hardly the stuff of Malthusian population numbers.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 08:25:01 +0000