Prairie Dogs Build Their Burrows In A Pretty Intelligent Way That Creates The Bernoulli Effect

"Prairie dogs have an excellent understanding of fluid dynamics. My PhD advisor was a prairie dog."

Ayoub

• Published in Interesting
• September 26, 2022

Usually found in the grasslands across the central and western United States, prairie dogs are widely celebrated for their significant ecological virtues. Their elaborate underground colonies (also called prairie dog towns) offer shelter for toads, jackrabbits, and rattlesnakes.

They create bare patches of ground by grazing and burrowing, which attracts several insects that birds can feed on. Prairie dogs themselves are the main food source for many animals including some endangered black-footed ferrets, hawks, and coyotes.

Prairie dogs create islands of habit that benefit more than 150 different species which makes them “keystone” species. They even help fertilize the soil and aerate it, which in turn allows many plants to thrive in that environment.

A Redditor who goes by the username u/MohammadRezaPahlavi made a post on the r/todayilearned subReddit sharing a quite interesting fact about prairie dogs. The subreddit is dedicated to sharing the new thing that people randomly learn and encourages Redditors to share the specific but interesting facts they learned that day.

The post sheds light on the intelligent way prairie dogs build their burrows. Scroll down and check out the full Reddit post, and scroll a little further to read comments from the original post.

These cute little furry guys are much smarter than you might think!

Here's the original Reddit post by u/MohammadRezaPahlavi:

Here's how the Reddit community reacted to this quite interesting fact about prairie dogs:

This user contributed with a link to a diagram that explains the whole phenomenon.

The link in the previous post leads to the following diagram:

That's one way to describe it I guess.

"I'm pretty sure Uncle Ben is going to have a show on TLC or Discovery before long..." -profdc9

Something had to be done about the smell.

Sharing many similarities with prairie dogs' burrows and their flat orifice.

I'm trying to picture it in my head and it's perfect in every way imaginable.

"This happened over hundreds of thousands to million of years"

It's been improving over many generations.

Another extremely important piece of information about prairie dogs.

The prairie dogs do it more efficiently.

They obviously need offices too. They have important matters to attend to.

"Prairie dogs aren't even real dogs"

"That's how boring Lubbock is."

Prairie dogs are way too cute.

This person is asking the important questions.

Just like prairie dogs, we all like it cool.

"Natural selection is forcing brain structure changes."

Nature never fails to amaze us. No matter how much we think we know about it, something always comes out of nowhere and proves that we've only uncovered the very tip of the iceberg.

Animals are so much smarter than we think; we consider every other creature inferior to human beings, but we've never taken a closer look at some animals and uncovered their true potential. If you enjoyed this, make sure to check out similar content on our platform.

Ayoub