Prairie dogs can describe what humans look like
January 23rd, 2011 - 5:39 pm ICT by IANSLondon, Jan 23 (IANS) Prairie dogs chat with each other and can describe what different human beings look like.The species, only found in North America, call out to warn their friends when a predator approaches their habitat.
Not only that, they have calls for ‘human’, one for ‘hawk’ and another for ‘coyote’, radio station NPR reports, according to the Daily Mail.
Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University in the US has been studying about prairie dogs for 30 years, particularly deciphering their language to “open the door for understanding how other species communicate”.
The prairie dog’s barks, yips and chirping sounds are really a sophisticated form of communication that contains a vocabulary of at least 100 words, Slobodchikoff claims, according to a Arizona statement.
“The little yips prairie dogs make, contain a lot of information,” he said. “They can describe details of predators such as their size, shape, colour and how fast they are going.
“They also can discriminate whether an approaching animal is a coyote or a dog, and they can decipher different types of birds.”
Slobodchikoff and his students hid themselves in prairie dog villages and recorded the noises the rodents made whenever a human, hawk, dog or coyote passed through them.
What they found was that the prairie dog issues different calls depending on the intruder. The researchers discovered this by analysing the recorded calls for frequency and tone.
They concluded that it doesn’t have one call for ‘danger’, rather it has a collection of warning noises - or a language.
- Prairie dogs can 'describe humans' in their own 'language' - Jan 22, 2011
- Prairie dogs are chatterboxes - Jan 24, 2010
- Prairie dogs 'kiss and cuddle more when they have an audience' - Feb 15, 2011
- Rising man-made noise pollution levels threatening fish - Jun 02, 2010
- Israel shoos away dogs with high-pitched noise - Apr 30, 2011
- Dogs yawn hearing master do the same - May 10, 2012
- '2010 PREDATORS' are 'Ipod versions' - Robert Rodriguez - Aug 03, 2010
- What makes Justin Beiber sound so unique? - Feb 18, 2011
- Birds use different calls to mob predator - Jun 09, 2009
- Scientists try to decipher "secret language" of elephants - Feb 23, 2010
- 'Goatsucker' chupacabras monster 'is as much victim as villain' - Oct 22, 2010
- Children can read dog barks better than adults - Oct 14, 2011
- Whales distressed by noise of ships' propellers - Feb 09, 2012
- How bats distinguish between the calls of their own and different species - May 20, 2010
- Language may play key role in learning meanings of numbers - Feb 08, 2011
Tags: barks, coyote, daily mail, different types of birds, hawk, human beings, intruder, london jan, north america, northern arizona university, prairie dog, prairie dogs, predator, predators, radio station, rodents, size shape, types of birds, vocabulary, yips