At the Lake Superior Zoo you can find community everywhere. However, there’s no community as organized as the prairie dogs.

Zoo keeper Jessica Kretsch says, “they’ll have little colonies and they have like separate little like rooms kind of. And they’ll have like little nurseries, they’ll have little food rooms.”

The prairie dogs have underground colonies. Jessica says ,”They’ll go down a couple feet, like six feet, and then it might be like 15 feet wide type thing. I have read that the biggest colony ever found was down in Texas, obviously. Everything’s bigger down there. It was 100 miles long, like 250 miles wide, and it had like around 400 million individuals, is what they estimated. Which is crazy.”

The prairie dogs seem to have their own individual lives at the zoo. The zoo keepers have a guestimate to how many dogs they have and say they stick to themselves. And Jessica mentions another quirky thing they do on their own saying, “They’ll have little graveyards in there. Which is one of the coolest thing about them is because we actually get bones from our prairie dogs, is they’ll clean out their little graveyards.