Every animal has its own way of alerting its fellow members if an attack or predator is coming. What first comes to mind are birds and monkeys, but have you ever thought about how prairie dogs give off alert signals? How do prairie dogs know who is a predator and who is safe to leave alone? Here we will learn how prairie dogs warn their fellow colony members and the different types of calls they have to differentiate the threat level.
In the research study done in Flagstaff, Arizona during the time July 12, 2004, and August 1, 2014, researchers looked at a colony that had 55 adult Gunnison prairie dogs and studied how they reacted to humans wearing different colored shirts. To make sure there were no confounding variables that could impact the study they had three women around the same height and weight and each walked at the same pace of 20m/min. There were three paths that they each had to walk and each woman walked these paths a different amount of times with their different colored shirts which were the colors yellow, green, and blue. There was one observer who sat on a hill about 30 meters away from the colony in order to record the calls and identify who was in the walk-through. In order to tell which prairie dogs were in the study, they marked them and were able to record 82 calls from 48 individual prairie dogs. The results of the calls for each shirt is as follows: nine calls to all three shirts (27 calls), 16 calls to two shirts (32 calls), and 23 called to one shirt (23 calls). There was also a frequency recorded to measure how each call was different and there was a wavelength between 440 and 640 nm.
This means that there were different frequencies given to alarm the fellow prairie dogs that danger was coming. What was interesting about the study was that the prairie dogs did not have different calls for yellow and green shirts because they could not tell the difference in the colors. But there was a different call for the women in blue shirts and that call was different than the call for the women in the yellow shirt. This means that prairie dogs have a dichromatic color vision and can see mostly blue and yellow wavelengths and that is why they had different reactions to those colored shirts. The researchers also noticed that there was no difference in how fast the prairie dogs responded to the different colored shirts. They would scurry to their burrows at the same fast pace. Look at all this new information you learned on the prairie dog! Bet you did not know they could only see dichromatically. Now we know that prairie dogs call to the others in their colony when they see a predator and scurry onto their burrows. This is to show that not all animals have the same alerting tactics but they do have the same goal, which is to keep the colony or group safe.
Slobodchikoff, C. N., Paseka, A., & Verdolin, J. L. (2009). Prairie dog alarm calls encode labels about predator color. Animal Cognition, 12(3), 435-439. https://doiorg/10.1007/s10071-008-0203-y
