Most often, Hoogland has found, the perpetrator is a female from the same coterie, but not the mother. It's positively baffling. The same females that just a week earlier would have cannibalized their sisters' pups now nurse any pup within the coterie. They don't see them in April when the winds are howling and they're killing each other's babies. This complex and costly system pays off, Hoogland thinks, in predator avoidance.
Prairie dogs spend almost all day above ground feeding and on the alert.
In one colony, Hoogland and his field crew saw only 22 predation events in 73,000 hours of observation over 16 years. Curiously, Hoogland has found that some prairie dogs regularly share in the duties of giving alarm calls, while others remain silent. In part, this is because adults with nearby relatives call more readily, presumably because they have more to protect than loners with no relatives in the area. However, even two prairie dogs in identical family situations still often differ in their willingness to call. I have no hope of ever understanding all these things.