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Wildlife Café

10 most asked prairie dog questions—answered by a wildlife expert

Prairie dogs may be small, but they have a large impact on North America's grasslands. These highly social rodents are ecosystem engineers, creating underground towns that provide food and shelter for dozens of other species while helping shape the prairie itself.

In this episode of World Wildlife Fund's Wildlife Café series, Callie and prairie dog expert Noelle Guernsey answer the internet's biggest questions about prairie dogs, revealing why these remarkable animals are among the most important—and misunderstood—wildlife on the Great Plains.

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About Noelle Guernsey

This episode features WWF conservation expert Noelle Guernsey, who shares her expertise on prairie dog ecology, grassland conservation, and the collaborative efforts helping restore these vital ecosystems.

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Transcript

Callie: Hi everyone. I'm Callie from World Wildlife Fund, and in today's episode of Wildlife Cafe, we are answering the Internet's most   burning questions about prairie dogs.  Welcome back to Wildlife Cafe. Let's get started.

  1. So, what are prairie dogs? Okay, sandy fur, tiny round ears, a little round, a little chunky, a little silly, and absolutely adorable. But don't be fooled by their cuteness. These burrowing rodents not only live incredibly complex social lives; they're also one of the most ecologically important animals in North America.  Full ecosystem engineers, keystone species, the whole thing. We'll get into it.
  2. What's the difference between a prairie dog and a meerkat?  Such a fair question. Some people even call prairie dogs the meerkats of America, making this extra confusing, but they're actually not related at all. Meerkats are carnivores related to mongooses and live in southern Africa. Prairie dogs, on the other hand, are rodents that are mostly vegetarian, found in North America, and are actually related to squirrels. Completely different animals on completely different continents. There's also only one species of meerkat, but there are five species of prairie dog:  the black-tailed prairie dog, which is the most common, the white-tailed, Gunnisons, the Utah, and the Mexican prairie dog, with the last two being endangered.
  3. Where do prairie dogs live? Prairie dogs live in the grasslands or prairies of Western North America. Historically, prairie dogs could be found from Southern Canada all the way to Mexico, though today their range is much smaller. Within these prairie ecosystems, prairie dogs live in large colonies or towns that once contained hundreds of millions of individuals.  The biggest one ever recorded was in Texas: 25,000 square miles, 400 million prairie dogs. Think about that. And these towns are structured like actual neighborhoods, divided into wards, each containing family groups called coteries. Each coterie, which is home to a breeding male, a few females and their young, has its own burrow territory.  And those burrows, surprisingly impressive. Black-tailed prairie dogs build raised dome-shaped entrances. Not for aesthetics, but for function. Better lookout for predators, flood prevention... These guys thought of absolutely everything.
  4. Why are they called prairie dogs? This is a great question. "Prairie", as you may have already deduced, because they live in the prairie. And "dog" because of the bark-like alarm call they make. We'll hear that later. It's pretty cool.
  5. How long do prairie dogs live?  If they're lucky, five to eight years in the wild, because other wildlife loves to eat them.
  6. What do prairie dogs eat? Grasses, leafy plants mostly. And their grazing is actually a sneaky defense move too. Keeping vegetation short around the colony gives them clear sight lines to spot predators. Efficient, strategic, and that's why we call them ecosystem engineers.  And it benefits their neighbors too. Bison, pronghorn, and birds all hang around prairie dog colonies because the shorter grass means better food diversity and better visibility for predator spotting.  Prairie dogs don't just build a town; they build an entire community. Keystone species, remember?
  7. What eats prairie Dogs? Foxes, black-footed ferrets, coyotes, badgers, eagles, hawks. Actually, the black-footed ferret, one of North America's most endangered mammals, eats almost exclusively prairie dogs and also lives in their abandoned burrows. Cottontail rabbits, burrowing owls, tiger salamanders, swift foxes, and rattlesnakes all do this as well.  Prairie dogs are basically running an entire apartment complex out there.
  8. Are prairie dogs smart? Genuinely like, yes. We already know they're engineers, but their communication system is also so complex that scientists think it qualifies as an actual language.  And not just any language, potentially the most sophisticated animal vocal language ever decoded. More complex than chimps, dolphins, or orcas.  They have different calls for different predators: Hawk, coyote, human, and when describing humans, they can even communicate things like clothing color and body size. It's wild.

    Let's hear from WWF's Prairie Dog expert Noelle Guernsey, who can tell us more about her experience working with and trying to outsmart prairie dogs.

    Noelle: Hey Callie, happy to share. In the past, I used to translocate colonies out of conflict areas to key conservation areas.  I would systematically live trap prairie dogs, and they quickly became familiar with our team. At first, they would treat my truck like other vehicles, but rapidly perceived that my truck and I were dangerous. You could see and hear their alarm. And despite best efforts to show up in different vehicles or in different clothes and hats, they never forgot us. The stragglers and the colonies were always the hardest ones to catch because of their caution, and our inability to communicate that if they just let us catch them, they would be reunited with the rest of the colony in an area where they would be allowed to thrive.
  9. Callie: How do Prairie Dogs communicate, and what do they sound like?  Prairie dogs have an extensive range of vocal calls and body signals. Most famously, the warning bark, which sounds like this... They also do social chatter, and then there's the jump yip, a move that black-tailed and Mexican prairie dogs do that looks exactly as chaotic as it sounds... Scientists still aren't totally sure what the jump yet means. It could be territorial, it could be a bonding thing, could be an all-clear. Jury's still out.
  10. Can you have a prairie dog as a pet?  Technically, it is legal in some states, but definitely worth thinking through carefully. As we've learned, prairie dogs are highly social and need a lot of space and specialized care. Some species, like the Utah and the Mexican prairie dog, are threatened or endangered, and taking them out of the wild could contribute to population decline.  If you're considering getting a prairie dog as a pet, check out our responsible pet guide first.

So here's the tough part. For all their importance-the engineering, the language, the entire ecosystem they support-prairie dogs are struggling. Disease, habitat loss, and conflict with humans have reduced their range to only about 2% of what it historically was.  One of the biggest culprits? The plague. Sylvatic plague can tear through an entire prairie dog colony with alarming speed, and the fallout doesn't stop there. The black-footed ferret, one of North America's most endangered mammals, depends almost entirely on prairie dogs for food and shelter. So when plague hits a colony, ferrets lose both at once. While humans can get pretty easily treated with antibiotics under the rare instance of contacting the plague, protecting prairie dogs and ferrets is a little trickier.

Then, there's the ongoing tension with agriculture. As farming expands across the Great Plains, grasslands get converted, and prairie dogs simply run out of space. But beyond habitat loss, there's also a more direct conflict. Many ranchers view prairie dogs as pests, since their burrowing and grazing is commonly assumed to compete with livestock for land. This has led to widespread poisoning, plow up, and even shooting of prairie dogs across their range, which when you understand how ecologically important these animals are, is a pretty significant problem.

Now this is where WWF comes in. WWF is working to give prairie dogs and the other animals that rely on them a real shot at the future.  Here's what that actually looks like in practice.  First, monitoring. And here's Noelle again to tell us more.

Noelle: Yeah, thanks Callie. WWF helps coordinate annual surveys at prairie dog colonies across multiple sites. It sounds simple, but it's really foundational. Our great partners that are caretaking prairie dog and black-footed ferret sites will map the size of colonies using GPS units and estimate the number of prairie dogs in a colony. Tracking how prairie dog populations are doing over time means that scientists can catch problems early before a bad situation becomes an irreversible one. This takes a lot of time, coordination, and resources, but it is really, really important.

Callie: Second, coexistence. WWF works directly with ranchers, native nations, land, other rural community members to find practical ways for people and prairie dogs to share the landscape. Because conservation only sticks when it works for the people living alongside these animals too.  That means finding common ground, not just drawing a line in the dirt.

Third, disease prevention. So the plague. WWF is tackling it head on with a bunch of exciting new tech. Let's go back to the field to find out more. Back to you, Noelle.

Noelle: Preventing the occurrence of plague is really critical to maintaining populations of prairie dogs and food and habitat for many associated species. This requires annual abatement using tools that eliminate fleas, which are the carrier of the plague bacterium. Fipbits are a peanut butter-flavored edible bait laced with a flea-killing product, which is similar to dog and cat flea prevention products. When consumed by a prairie dog, Fipbits protect them for up to one year. To deliver Fipbits to the thousands of prairie dogs in a colony, WWF and Partners developed a triple shooter that distributes three Fipbits simultaneously from an all-terrain vehicle or drone.

Callie: Fourth, black-footed ferret recovery. We support both current and future ferret recovery sites, knowing that a stable prairie dog population is essentially a prerequisite for ferret survival.  And woven through all of it, education. From elementary school classrooms to college campuses, to right here on YouTube, WWF is helping people understand why prairie dogs matter.  Because the more people know, the more we can help.

So what can you do? If you're wondering how you can help prairie dogs, there's actually a few really easy ways to make a difference.  You can support WWF's work by donating. You can also learn more at WWF's website. And if you're watching on YouTube,  don't forget to like, comment, and share. When people don't know, they don't care, and when they don't care, nothing changes. Sharing this video is a small action that can spark a much bigger movement.  I hope you learned a fun thing or two about prairie dogs, and I'll see you next time on Conservation Coffee Chats.