Meeting Abstract

P1.124  Jan. 4  Gunnison’s prairie dog alarm calls in response to two predators appearing simultaneously DRAYTON, Lindsey; STERLING, Kenneth A.*; SLOBODCHIKOFF, Constantine N.; Duke University; Northern Arizona University; Northern Arizona University kas263@nau.edu

Gunnison’s prairie dogs (Cynomys gunnisoni) encode descriptive information in their alarm calls in response to a predator’s species, individual identity, size, color, and behavior. In this study, we evaluated the situation where two predators appeared simultaneously in order to determine whether the prairie dogs would encode information about both predators into the alarm call. We first recorded alarm calls in response to two predators independently, a human and a domestic dog. We then recorded alarm calls in response to both the human and dog together in order to test the degree to which the prairie dogs were encoding information for each within one call. We analyzed the calls using discriminant function analysis on sixteen variables measured from sonograms. Results indicate that the alarm calls desribing each predator in the independent treatments were significantlydifferent and encoded specific characteristics for that predator. The alarm calls in response to the two predators together were significantly different from the calls for the two predators independently, but encoded more general characteristics, suggesting that the prairie dogs abstracted the essential characteristics of each predator and incorporated those into their calls.