IF CON SLOBODCHIKOFF hadn’t developed an allergy to darkling beetles, he might not have made fascinating discoveries about animal communication.
As a professor at Northern Arizona University, Slobodchikoff had been researching the desert-dwelling beetles, but in the 1980s, he became allergic to the insects’ secretion. The reaction was so severe that his lungs filled with fluid. Some universities might have made him stick with his subject. But NAU didn’t care where Slobodchikoff turned his attention, as long as he was making discoveries.
That freedom drew Slobodchikoff to a field of prairie dog holes he’d seen near a Denny’s restaurant in Flagstaff. And make discoveries he did. In fact, he broke more ground studying prairie dogs than the prairie dogs had broken in that field.
Slobodchikoff found that the burrowing rodents use both nouns and adjectives to communicate — and that if a person fires a gun nearby, the prairie dogs will identify the person as dangerous through one full cycle of the moon. (Many of us, on the other hand, couldn’t even identify one full cycle of the moon without a calendar.)
By recording the animals’ communications and then slowing down the speed at which they were played, Slobodchikoff could deconstruct the language. In one experiment, he had two researchers cross the field in yellow shirts, then in blue shirts. By finding the place where the sound changed, he could find how the prairie dogs “said” each color.
There were many reasons why no one had already made these discoveries, Slobodchikoff says, but a major hurdle was that scientists tend to study what they already believe to be true.
“Everyone ‘knew’ animals didn’t laugh, so they didn’t look,” he says. “Scientists are now finding out that if you tickle rats, they laugh. It’s in the ultrasonic frequency, so we didn’t notice it.”
Likewise, he says, when it came to prairie dogs, “people viewed them as an annoyance. A pest. What we don’t realize is that species have rich mental lives and they talk to each other.” They even can distinguish between circles, triangles and squares pulled on a cable between blinds. “Even kids sometimes have trouble telling them apart,” he says.
Slobodchikoff later turned his curiosity to other species, and his subsequent book, Chasing Doctor Dolittle, brought national attention to him and his discoveries. He’s happy to share some of the things he’s learned over his long career.
“Paper wasps have tiny little brains,” he says. “And yet studies show they can identify individual wasps based on facial markings. Each one knows every other wasp is in the hive. They have relationships: more friendly, less friendly. There’s the whole identification and social structure we identify with us humans.”
He’s also identified amazing connections between species with seemingly nothing in common. “If whale song is sped up 16 times, it sounds like birdsong,” he says. “Birdsong slowed down 16 times sounds like whale song. The kicker is that animals operate on different time scales. We operate on a life span of about 70 years. Crickets operate on about two months. If you elongate a cricket chirp from a two-month timespan to 70 years, it sounds just like an angelic choir singing.”
You don’t have to go far afield to observe far more sophisticated animal behavior than you expect. Slobodchikoff says a simple desert bush has 100 things going on at any given time.
“Bees collect nectar and return it to the hive, where they do a specific and complex dance showing other bees how to get there,” he says. “Aphids suck up sugars from the plant and secrete what they can’t process; ants like that honeydew. Once ants get enough of a certain kind, they move the aphids to another place, like we do cattle.”
Now retired from NAU but still an emeritus professor there, Slobodchikoff has begun studying communication between humans and their dogs, with help from amateur field researchers. And there’s surely plenty more for him to discover.