Prairie Dogs Talk a Sophisticated Talk
Take a sound bite out of this recently discovered linguistic marvel: The barking language of prairie dogs may just be the most complicated language of any animal. Con Slobodchikoff—a biology professor at Northern Arizona University—studied their sounds very closely and found that the animals have different “words” to describe each of their many predators and that a single bark can convey information about the size, type, color, and location of an attacker. Slobodchikoff also discovered that, just as we all have distinct voices, every prairie dog has a unique tonal identity.
Written by Logan Scherer