Once again on animal communication

I wrote a few months back about communication among different species of dolphins, and this article from the Daily Mail seemed to be an interesting follow-up.

Prairie dogs talk to each other and can describe what different human beings look like, according to scientists...

Professor Con Slobodchikoff, of Northern Arizona University, has been studying prairie dogs for 30 years.

He is particularly interested in deciphering their language because to do so would '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, Professor Slobodchikoff claims.

'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.'

Professor 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.

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...

To further develop this line of investigation, Professor Slobodchikoff gathered four volunteers and had them walk through a prairie dog village four times. On each occasion they wore the same clothing, except for different colour shirts.

The prairie dogs responded by issuing different calls, depending on the colour of the volunteers' shirts.

Professor Slobodchikoff then discovered they also issued different calls for varying heights, and even for abstract shapes including cardboard circles, squares and triangles.

He told NPR: 'Essentially they were saying, "Here comes the tall human in the blue," versus, "Here comes the short human in the yellow."'

Interesting stuff. Of course, I've always been interested in animal communication, so much so that I have the audio from this clip as my cellphone ringtone (it's not annoying at all, I swear):

I'm hoping that our scientist friends can continue to learn about different modes of animal communication, so that maybe one day I can tell my ridiculously nervous cat Jobu to chill the f*** out... but that's probably wishful thinking.

[Daily Mail]