The little desert squirrels known as prairie dogs have a very complex communication system. They communicate with each other (in groups of up to a million) with barks and yips. Recent research has shown that if you walked past them, they would describe you- and be very detailed about it!
It seems that their language is so complex- that there are different noises for different types of predators, and for example ‘humans are coming.’ Startling new information suggests not only can they communicate ‘humans are coming’ in just one word, this word is so specific that it also describes various details about which human is coming. Experiments have shown that their noises differentiate depending on the height, size, speed, proximity and colour of shirt of the human.
Therefore leading professor Con Slobodchikoff, who has been studying prairie dogs for 3 years suggests that in just one ‘word’, the creatures are able to communicate sentences such as ‘There’s a short skinny guy just a few meters away, wearing an orange shirt who is creeping towards us.”
Auditory Communication
Auditory communication unlike visual communication can be used ‘around corners’ as well as in the dark. It is also much faster than chemical communication and has the ability to carry long and complicated messages. Auditory communication can only be found in animals with well-developed nervous systems, as it requires complex sound producing and receiving organs. The other issue is that my sending auditory messages, an animal can also draw attention to itself and signal its location to a predator. Male toads call to attract females, baby elephants trumpet to call for their mothers, sperm whales communicate between their family in clicks and pauses and cats meow to be fed or let inside/outside. Of course the most complex example of auditory communication is human speech, which is learnt from a variety of relations form a young age.
The Language of Prairie Dogs
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