5 Eerily Sophisticated Ways Animals Communicate

5 Prairie Dogs Are Talking About You (and We Mean You Specifically)

Prairie dogs are chatty little desert squirrels that live in massive underground "towns" numbering in the hundreds or thousands (and occasionally in the millions, which is big enough to have a community college and an NFL team). They communicate with loud barks and yips, which you'd expect from something called a prairie dog. But if you walk by them and they start making their little noises, keep something in mind: They're describing you, right down to your wacky ironic T-shirt.

Prairie dogs have a language so complex that they have a different "word" they can shout to identify what kind of predator is approaching, and thus have a specific noise that means "humans are coming." But one expert found that prairie dogs had variations in their calls depending on which human they saw. In experiments, the dogs' calls would differentiate based on what color shirts researchers were wearing, how tall or short they were, how close they were and how fast they were moving.

That's right -- the prairie dogs were actually describing each person in remarkable detail with a single chittering bark. A professor named Con Slobodchikoff has been studying prairie dog calls for 30 years, and says that one vocalization can translate into "There's a tall skinny guy in green a few yards away and he's sprinting toward us," sort of like that scene in Wayne's World where Mike Myers speaks five English sentences with one word of Cantonese.

This means that prairie dogs possess a level of communication more sophisticated than that of dolphins or chimps, and yet for some reason we have yet to dress them up as butlers or make them dive through hoops in front of spoiled children.

4 Fairy Wrens Talk Shit to Predators (to Impress Women)

Splendid fairy wrens are pretty little blue birds in Australia that have probably been insufferable ever since they found out that we gave them that name.

Fairy wrens are routinely murdered for food by other birds, primarily butcher birds. As we have previously discussed, butcher birds are about the closest thing to freewheeling lunatics in the avian world, with a penchant for impaling their still-living victims on thorn bushes. And they love to food-murder fairy wrens.

So, one would expect fairy wrens to lay low if their psychopathic archnemesis is in the area, which is precisely the opposite of what actually happens. When a butcher bird lets loose with the chirp of bloodthirsty mania, male fairy wrens will immediately answer it with their own call. The two birdsongs are so similar that it sounds like the wren is singing a duet with its would-be killer. Essentially this is like Jason Voorhees stalking through a rickety cabin while some hidden teenager calls out, "Warmer. Warmer. Waaaarmerrr."

Why would the wrens risk exposing themselves to predators like this? The same reason males of any species do most things -- to attract females. The male fairy wrens are far from the first guys in history to tap dance in the face of certain malevolent destruction to impress women. It's boner-fueled confidence (or "bonefidence," as it is known in the scientific community we invented in our minds just now), and girls love a confident, reckless badass.

Scientists call the phenomenon vocal hitchhiking. When a predator like the butcher bird is nearby, the female fairy wrens are obviously listening intently to its calls. While the attention of the females is piqued, the males jump in with their own bird bravado, knowing that they have an audience. The females become smitten with these devil-may-care rebels, who are then free to swoop in and carry the ladies off for a night of boundless passion, provided the butcher birds haven't eaten the shit out of them.

3 Alcon Caterpillars Are Smooth-Talking Con Artists

The caterpillar of the alcon blue butterfly is kind of like Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act -- it uses the power of song to disguise its true identity and trick others into caring for it. "That's a strikingly human tactic!" you might say. "How does this arthropod accomplish such a thing without higher brain function or a wacky premise involving nuns and the mob?"

Well, the mechanism seems pretty simple -- the first segment of the caterpillar's abdomen has a small lip that it scrapes to make its "song." But when the caterpillar sings it, it sounds just like a red ant queen -- so much so that any ants within listening distance will carry the butterfly larva back to their colony and literally give it the royal treatment, as if it were actually the queen.

Either because caterpillars are geniuses or because ants are really stupid, the ants will guard the caterpillar with their lives, even against the real queen, sometimes exiling or killing her if the caterpillar is convincing enough. That's like a Miley Cyrus impersonator showing up at a concert and usurping her, then going on to live the life of a famous pop star while the real Miley is either deported or devoured by Disney executives.

In fact, the ants are so stoked about their new adoptee that they will kill their own brood to feed it if times are tight. That's right -- the ants will happily feed their children to the caterpillar, because it sings a song that tells them to.

2 Peruvian Warbling Antbirds Argue Over Infidelity

Peruvian warbling antbirds live in mated pairs that are fiercely territorial, which essentially makes them just like every childless suburban couple that lived on your street growing up. However, rather than discouraging others from wandering onto their property by chaining up a three-legged dog they found tossed in the SPCA dumpster after two failed gassings, the antbirds will belt out a powerful duet in perfect harmony to let everybody know that they live there. It's all very sweet, in its own way ... until a single female antbird comes sauntering along.

At this point, the male in the couple immediately adjusts his song to a type of mating call to lure her over. You know, just to be neighborly. "Come over! Maybe we'll cook some dinner, have a little wine, groom the feathers on my little bird boner ..." Divorce, it seems, shatters as many antbird homes as it does ours.

At this point, the female in the couple will begin to actively jam her mate's amorous crooning by singing arrhythmically over him and queering his pitch. The male, of course, tries to sing over her, and before long they're in a musical domestic dispute, which is not anywhere near as whimsical as it appears in My Fair Lady.

1 Geckos Order Food

One thing humans and geckos have in common (apart from an intense loathing of overpriced car insurance) is that both species would prefer to have food delivered to them rather than gather up the old Hamburger Helper box and half an onion left in the cupboard and try to scrape together a meal that won't shotgun diarrhea through the bottom of the toilet. The day gecko of Madagascar seems to have learned how to do this by getting deliveries from tiny green insects called treehoppers.

Treehoppers drill into, um, trees, to drink the sap inside. After digesting the sap, they excrete a sugary liquid called honeydew, so named for reasons that cannot approach rational explanation. Day geckos love the stuff, and the treehoppers accept takeout orders. The gecko will approach the insect and nod its head methodically, as if it's appraising the furniture. The treehopper responds by shaking around and firing a translucent shit pellet into the gecko's face. The lizard then eagerly laps it up, and we're telling you right now that the video of this is about a hundred times freakier than we can put into words:

The gecko walks right up to it and nods, and the insect shoots the shit right into his mouth like he'd just ordered it out of a vending machine. It isn't clear what exactly the treehoppers get out of this exchange. Scientists think that maybe the geckos scare other predators away that would straight-up eat the treehoppers rather than just their sugar poop. Or maybe the treehoppers were tired of having to pay to get their carpets steam-cleaned after every meal.

Monte Richard is a columnist for DaftGadgets.com, or you can check out his blog.

For more on ways animals will kill us, check out 6 Modern Technologies Animals Invented Millions of Years Ago and The 7 Most Impressive Examples of Animal Architecture.