Yellow-bellied Marmot

Yellow-bellied marmots produce alarm calls that vary with threat urgency—a system enabling receivers to calibrate their response to danger level. High-urgency calls trigger immediate flight to burrows. Low-urgency calls trigger vigilance increase without abandoning foraging. This graduated response system prevents both under-reaction to serious threats and over-reaction that wastes foraging time.

Call urgency matches predator behavior. Approaching predators elicit higher-urgency calls than stationary ones. Predators moving toward the colony trigger more urgent calls than those moving tangentially. The caller encodes not just predator presence but predator trajectory—information receivers use to predict threat development.

Audience composition affects calling. Marmots call more when close relatives are present and less when surrounded by non-relatives. This kin-biased calling matches the inclusive fitness logic: warning relatives benefits your genes, warning non-relatives doesn't. The pattern demonstrates that alarm calling isn't reflexive but strategically adjusted.

Social learning shapes alarm response. Young marmots initially respond identically to all alarm calls. Through experience, they learn to distinguish urgency levels and respond appropriately. This learned discrimination enables more efficient adult response—a training process parallel to meerkat pup development.

For organizations, marmots demonstrate that urgency encoding prevents both under- and over-reaction. 'Fire' shouldn't be the only alarm level. Graduated urgency systems enable proportionate response that conserves resources while protecting against real threats.