{"id":190193,"date":"2025-12-17T22:58:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-17T22:58:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/190193\/"},"modified":"2025-12-17T22:58:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-17T22:58:09","slug":"it-was-home-to-400-million-chattering-residents-and-almost-the-size-of-ireland-and-was-deep-underground","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/190193\/","title":{"rendered":"It was home to 400 million chattering residents and almost the size of Ireland \u2013 and was deep underground"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earth is full of incredible wildlife spectacles, with thousands of animals gathering in one place \u2013 often putting on an awe-inspiring display. But if you want to find out the largest colony of mammals, you\u2019ll have to turn to the history books.<\/p>\n<p>According to the Guinness World Records, zoologist and ecologist C H Merriam discovered a prairie dog town that spanned 6.5 million hectares in West Texas, USA, in 1901.<\/p>\n<p>This made it almost the size of the Republic of Ireland, with estimates suggesting that the colony supported over 400 million prairie dogs.<\/p>\n<p>The black-tailed prairie dog is known for its loud and complex alarm calls and large colonies \u2013 also known as \u2018towns\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>Their towns are made up of interconnected burrows and mounds, which provides them with protection from predators such as coyotes, eagles and snakes, and are often described as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.discoverwildlife.com\/animal-facts\/ecosystem-engineers\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">ecosystem engineers<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Earth is full of incredible wildlife spectacles, with thousands of animals gathering in one place \u2013 often putting&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190194,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[85,46,141,386],"class_list":{"0":"post-190193","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190193\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}