We are familiar with our pets making sounds to let us know what they want. The most common is of course the growl, the bark, the hiss and other expressions that mean Back off, or You're trespassing. But there are others. My own elderly cat makes a special whimpering sound that means "Would you please bring me some water?".
Scientists are constantly surprised by new studies that prove that animals can talk to others of their same species. The list keeps getting longer. It includes whales, dolphins, elephants, birds, wolves, and many others.
The amazing case of prairie dog language
Con Slobodchikoff, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biological Sciences of Northern Arizona University, has spent 30 years watching, listening, recording, and decoding prairie dog language. He says that humans can learn to understand their language. It has a very precise set of "words" or sounds for a large number of things, their size, their color, and other characteristics.
"They're able to describe the color of clothes the humans are wearing, their size and shape, even whether a human once appeared with a gun," he says. For example, in one short chirp they can communicate "Tall, thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony".
How he decoded prairie dog language:
Slobodchikoff and his students went out into the prairie dog villages, hid behind bushes, and stuck out their microphones whenever a human, or a dog, or a coyote, or a hawk passed through. They recorded calls that the prairie dogs made in response to different predators.
Then he took his recordings to a lab and used a computer program to analyze the sounds. Any given sound is actually made up of different frequencies and overtone layers on top of one another. Slobodchikoff's computer measured those frequencies and separated out all the component tones and overtones.
What Slobodchikoff discovered was that the calls clustered into different groups, and each cluster had its own signature set of frequencies and tones. Prairie dogs, in other words, don't just have a call for "danger" — they have one call for "human," another for "hawk" and a third for "coyote." They can even differentiate between coyotes and domesticated dogs.
Listen to interview with Prof Slobodchikoff on CBC radio - http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2013/06/21/learning-animal-language-from-prairie-dogs/
NPR -. Transcript and audio. There is also an interactive sample of recordings "Can you speak prairie dog?" - http://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discovered-prairiedogese
Watch video of prairie dog couple talking and saying good bye with a kiss - http://now.msn.com/watch-two-prairie-dogs-romantic-goodbye-in-this-viral-video
Video where Prof Slobochikoff explains the subject - http://richardbrenneman.wordpress.com/2013/06/05/prairie-dogs-theyre-onto-your-game/
Book review of Prof Slobodchikoff's book Chasing Doctor Doolittle - http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-12-28/opinions/36072344_1_prairie-dogs-con-slobodchikoff-animal-language
Link to this post - http://ottersandsciencenews.blogspot.ca/2013/07/animals-talk-just-they-dont-talk-to-us.html
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