Really neat interaction showing off their role as secondary pollinators. Altogether I saw two rattlesnakes and a bullsnake in the span of an hour. This was at the edge of a large black-tailed prairie dog colony in the foothills of the Rockies. I missed the strike by a couple minutes but you can see how big the fangs are in this photo. Both are fairly large adults.
Ah, thinking like an Englishman who must protect his sheep from the wolves and so drives them to extinction. What the prairie dogs understand is that they are part of an interdependent system of living beings. If they kill this snake while it's vulnerable, a few more of their number might survive. they could kill many snakes this way. But what might the effects be when their predator is gone? Their population would boom, and they'd need to develop agriculture to keep their many children and elderly from starving to death.
If you want to introduce class society to prairie dogs, that's on you.
The story isn't for the prairie dogs... Are... are people out there telling the crab bucket story to crabs?
I am