Study
Prairie dog alarm calls encode labels about predator colors
Slobodchikoff, C. N.; Paseka, A.; Verdolin, J. L.
Animal Cognition, 2008
Human volunteers walked through prairie dog colonies wearing shirts of different colours, and the resulting alarm calls were recorded and analysed acoustically for consistent differences.
- Studied in
- Cynomys gunnisoni
- Sample size
- wild colonies presented with human walkers in different coloured shirts
Calls differed consistently with the colour of the walker’s shirt, as well as with the size and shape of the intruder.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Prairie dog alarm calls contain descriptive information about attributes of the predator, functioning as labels.
How NatureHQ reads it
This is the origin of "prairie dogs have a language", and it is a real, replicated acoustic finding that has been stretched a long way past itself. Two things are worth separating. That the calls vary with an intruder’s appearance is well supported. That the variation constitutes descriptive labels — words for colours — requires showing that other prairie dogs extract and act on that distinction, and the playback work testing receiver responses at that level of detail is much thinner than the acoustic analysis. A signal that varies is not automatically a signal that describes.
- Acoustic differences are established far more strongly than receiver responses to them.
- Shirt colour covaries with other properties of a walking human that are harder to control.
- Most of the work comes from one research group, and independent replication is limited.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Springer journalsPublished in a Springer journal.
doi.org/10.1007/s10071-008-0203-y
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-31.