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Alarm-Calling And Response Behaviors Of The Black-Tailed Prairie Dog In Kansas, Lloyd W. Towers Iii

Master's Theses

Prairie dogs (Cynomys spp.) use alarm calls to warn offspring and other kin of predatory threats. Dialects occur when vocalizations contain consistent differences among populations not isolated by geographic barriers. The Gunnison’s prairie dog (C. gunnisoni) has dialects in its alarm calls. The objectives of my study were to: (1) assess if the black-tailed prairie dog (C. ludovicianus) responded differently to alarm calls from other colonies than it did to alarm calls from its own colony, and (2) detect dialects, if they existed, in the alarm calls of the black-tailed prairie dog. The study included 8 black-tailed prairie dog colonies …