We're already spending that money. Helping to answer such questions is relatively new territory for prairie dog researchers, most of whom have devoted far more time to understanding the rodents' complex social structure. Prairie dogs organize themselves into family groups called coteries, which usually contain one male, several females and their juvenile offspring. Each coterie occupies its own territory, usually a half-acre or more, with dozens of burrow entrances. As the University of Maryland's Hoogland can attest, figuring out the dogs' relationships can take thousands of hours of observation and note-taking while huddled in a sleeping bag in an observation tower.
Most females mate with only their local male and give birth about five weeks after mating.
Then an epidemic of murder and cannibalism takes place underground, wiping out two of every five litters born. 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.