Oh hey, it's the lady next to you at the salad bar covering up her iceberg lettuce with spring greens. Ali Ward and this is Ologies, this is big squirrels. We got marmots, we got groundhogs, we got facts, figures, tongue twisters and scandals. But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show and make it possible. And you too can submit your questions before we record, and you can join Patreon for a dollar a month at
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I'm not great a sore throat. I think I'm coming down with cold.
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Always read the leaflet.
Okay, so marmatology. The word marmot goes back to the Latin root meaning mountain mouse. And this week we have a true expert. They did their undergrad at the University of Colorado Boulder and then went to U See Davis for a master's and a PhD in animal behavior. They are now a researcher and a professor at UCLA's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. They've spent years and years and years studying a complex communication of marmots and integrating
that into conservation efforts to influence environmental policy. And on a rainy January day here in La a few weeks ago, I got over to the university to lobso questions. First, just got to UCLA. I'm here to interview the groundhog expert. I got out of my car and I spilled twenty ounces of cold iced tea onto my crotch. It's so soaked, like it's not a little wet, it's soaked like I had hosed myself off.
This is what happens when you do interviews in person. Really never know what you're gonna get. Hey, I'm Alie, you waiting for me? Sorry about my pants.
We're already off to a memorable start. But clearly our ologist and the lovely hollyob in UCLA Media Relations, they were chill.
They were down to clown.
We went up to his office where he has all sorts of skulls and marmot art, even a roadkill groundhog that he and his wife, Janice taxidermied themselves, and we chatted all about the rodent de jour, including how and why we celebrate Groundhog's Day. The Buddhism and paganism of the midwinter slump, Romantic advice you should not take from a marmot what they are singing into the wind. How
to coexist with one in your garden. Why they don't get stressed about holiday binging, The real estate layout of a groundhog layer. What to do if you want a marmot as a pet, Why they're blood boggled. Science and the wandering etymology behind their aliases with animal behaviorist, conservationist, field biologist, professor and marmatologist doctor Daniel Blumstein, and Blumstein hee him right, Okay, this is news to me as of about fifteen minutes ago.
A groundhog is a woodchuck.
There are fifteen species of Marmotsky groundhogs are one of those species. An other name for groundhogs or woodchucks.
I had no idea. I thought they were different animals.
We have a holiday named after them, and it said about behavior and climate and weather and what's not to love about woodchucks.
The fact that they are a ven diagram that is just one circle is astounding me. What about whistle pig?
What's up with that? Whistle pig is a common name for some marmots. Okay, people call yellow bellied mormentus whistle pigs, but in general, woodchucks are the least social of the fifteen species of marmots. Babies emerge and then disperse. In their first year of life, they may settle around their mom. And my friend and colleague Chris Mayer at the University of Maine is studying woodchuck behavior in detail, and it's shown that there's a little more sociality than most people
think about when they look at woodchucks. But the other species are more social. So I study yellow bellied marmots, which are socially plastic. And what's really interesting about that allows us to understand the dynamics of you know, what's good about being social? Not a lot of things for marmots.
We can get into that. The rest of the species are much more social, and the kids stick around for a couple of years, and in some cases there's mothers are mating with sons to keep them around and alpine marmots. You know, you should not use marmots as a model for our behavior. There's all sorts of sort of stuff going down with marmots. You really want to know I'm.
Doing so a groundhog is the type of marmot. Yes, not all marmots are groundhogs. The cactus succulent. Correct, Right, what's the range of size? Because I picture a groundhog, I picture it like a beefy cat.
They're all about cat size.
Okay.
The Himalayan marmot Marmoda Himalaniana robusta. I think the robusta it's not like a beer or a coffee. It's because it's big. But most of them are sort of cat sized animals. But what's the size? I mean they double their mass every.
Year, right, every year they double.
They hibernate marmots are the biggest of the true hybrid bears. Don't hibernate bears. Estivate bears can't lose enough body heat to properly hibernate, so marmots lose their body heat. Not only that, we did a study where we borrowed animals from the wild, brought them back to the lab, hibernated them, put them back to the wild when we're done with them, and it turns out they actively suppress their metabolism and temperature,
which is super interesting. Yellow bellied marmots are incredibly efficient hibernators in big ones and the end of the year are about five kilos, which is pretty big. That's a big cat. They burn when they're in deep torpor. A gram of fata day, a gram.
Of fata day, so they got to get chunk up before they hibernate.
Yeah, they So basically, biomedical researchers study mormits in part to understand how you can be obese without having health consequences. So they don't get all the things that we get if we eat like a marmot. Actually marmots are vegetarians, so maybe we should eat like is.
It a difference between white fat and brown fat?
Well, they have both. And my friend who did the researcher on this walter aren't old formally in Germany. It said no, it got more complex than that. But I'll say the sort of dumb down version that I can understand, and that is that if you're a hibernator, you have to put on two types of fat. You have to put on heating oil and you have to put on insulation. So one of them is easier to burn during the winter for heating oil, and the other provides that insulation.
So what's really interesting is you know, you might think it's easy to study what an animal eats, It's actually really hard to study when an animal eats. When you begin thinking about that, these guys are looking for specific fatty acids, so they eat plants. But plants aren't plants aren't plants, and different parts of the same plant have
different fatty acid compositions. So what they're eating, the specific fatty acids they're eating in a particular ratios are important for putting on these different sorts of body fat.
And walk me back to what exactly is a marmot? Is it a rodent? Is it a what is.
A market Well, I would say that the king of rodents, but copy are the kings of rodents. I love copy bara, But marmots are the kings of the ground squirrels. So they're related to prairie dogs and ground squirrels a little less related to tree squirrels. There are lots of species of ground squirrels around the northern hemisphere and some in the southern hemisphere. Prairie dogs are only in North America,
and marmots have a whole Arctic distribution. They're found around the northern hemisphere but not in the southern hemisphere, so heads.
Up a marmot.
In general, it's a big, huge ground squirrel that can weigh up to fifteen pounds or seven kilograms. It can be up to two feet long, and there's about fifteen or so species.
They're among those. There are little guys, but overall they live mostly in North America and Eurasia. They're a bit docks and like they have cute little legs. They have a furry little tail if you like charismatic rodents. Also you can enjoy our Scurritiology episode about squirrels and our Cape Bearra episode in which we discuss the Pope's decision to class by them as a fish. And then what about groundhogs.
Groundhogs have a really interesting distribution. I think they go down into Georgia and they sort of go a swath across North America and end up in Fairbanks, Alaska. So this asocial grumpy marmot and they're a little bigger than other species. Because they're not efficient hibernators. They lose weight really quickly, so they get really fat and they lose a lot of weight. And groundhogs areally cue. They have really big ears. You look at them. I'm like, that's a groundhog.
And a groundhog is one of the larger, chunkier marmots with this briskly brownish fur. It's got a medium length tail. It looks kind of like a quaka having a bad day, just pissy. And Dan also studies yellow bellied marmots, which they are not known for their cowardice. I went down some marmot holes and the origin of that phrase is widely debated, but it may come from like an old timey imbalance of humors, meaning someone is jaundice, which is which, So that's kind of mean.
It's pretty cold, speaking.
Of marmots, curl up into And when we hibernated the marmits, it was super interesting. And why was it super interesting Because we went in and we had a power outage, just like, oh, we better weigh them. And we went into the hibernation room and pulled them out and they're wound up in a tight little ball and they feel like a fuzzy rock. They were cold, they were hard and stiff, and they were fuzzy. And I don't know if you've been to the Dead Sea, but it's sort
of the same. This doesn't fit my view of physics. Yeah, the dead sea. You walk into the dead sea and you sit down and you're sitting in the water and floating. That doesn't fit any fit. Picking up a living furry stone is not in the physics that I've been taught.
How low does their body temperature get?
So there are ground squirrels, artic ground squirrels that can get their body temperature below zero celsius, below thirty two. They have anti freeze. Pretty cool?
Is anyone studying groundhogs for like biomedical applications.
People are doing nasty things to groundhogs to understand, you know, obesity and how you can be obese without having problems of obesity. Because they get obese every year they double their masks. They have to put on fat and energy in order to not eat for seven or eight months. Marmots are kings of escape in captivity. So Marmot meetings you go and you hang out with all these people from all over the former Soviet Union order the Soviet
Union at the time, depending upon when you went. And one guy and they were using him in Russia Soviet Union for bioweapons research because they harbor some diseases. A lot of them have plague in Europe. But then they have other things as well. So this one guy was like, oh yeah, my KGB colonel came to me one day and said, you know, if the marmots break out one
more time, you will be fired. You know. So when we brought these into captivity to borrow them to hibernate them, we put them in stainless steel welded rabbit cages and the first thing they did was break the stainless steel wells and break out. So now they're running around this environmental chamber room and we have to catch them, and they wouldn't hibernate. And my colleague, late Ken Armitage, who started this long term study that I now try to
keep going. My colleague, basically, we're banging our heads together. Why are they hibernating? We've turned off the lights, we've turned down the temperature. What's going on? And he came in one morning and he had an insight, and his insight was, oh, maybe we need to give them bedding. So they put in some paper towels and the next day they were all curled up and hibernating. They made their little beds, they curled up, they hibernated, and that was it.
Well, the mattress is soft. Are they getting through steel?
They're rodents. They have teeth and they use them. I'm not putting my fingers into their mouth. Animals bite because I've been bitten by marmots, yes, you know, and so Marmo's bite.
Have you ever gotten stitches from a marmot?
I'm not gotten stitches, but I'm probably an error what's probably viewed as an erroneous data point in some CDC database, if there is a CDC anymore. Because I got bitten by a hibernating mormant because we had the power outage and picking them out, and the baby, a pop that was going through his first hibernation. It was about a kiloh and a half. That was very cute, and I was cuddling it and it had woken up enough that it just took a chunk out of my finger. So I went to the er for that one.
Oh, do you have to worry about any in the US like plague or Rabi's or anything like that.
Rabies maybe there's been one groundhog maybe, you know, but they don't really have rabies. Plague is an issue, but it's not an issue yet, really, so plague came over from Eurasia. And the reason prey dogs have been so decimated by plague is because they didn't evolve with it. Marmots have evolved with plague, the Eurasian ones have, at least, so their populations go up and down and they sort of deal with that. There's a really interesting story about that.
I'll tell you in a second. Right now, We're lucky, but I study them in Gunnison County, Colorado, and Gunnison County has gunnism pride dogs, and I'm really concerned and that periodically plague comes and knocks out all the preye dogs. You know, if you're studying prairie dogs, you get plague. Wow, you people get plague. You study paradogs. But you know that, so you do things to sort of you're aware of your symptoms. Sometimes you're dousing them with insecticides things like that.
Let's just take a quick relaxing break from the horrors of the news cycle to learn about the plague. So, marmots have fleas, and fleas can carry plague, which is an illness caused by a bacterium known as your Sinea pestis. It's named after pestilence and a nineteenth century French Swiss biologist named Alexandra Eerson.
Don't worry.
You can get many different types of plaque, such as bubonic, which produces big, festering lumps in your lymph nodes. You can get septiscemic, which gets into your blood. You can even get lung plague called pneumonic plague. You can spread that to others by coughing and stuff. Symptoms of these three vary, but overall you'll get headaches, weakness, a fever, chills, pneumonia, bulbous growths, and your extremities may turn black, gish purple.
And the Black Death taking place in the mid thirteen hundreds wiped out up to fifty million Europeans, or about half the continent's population.
Thanks Flees. It also took five.
Hundred years to figure out what bacterium was responsible, and our buddy Alexandra finally figured it out by, according to our other friend Wikipedia, obtaining specimens after bribing English sailors responsible for disposing of the bodies of plague victims. Since the plague never really left us, so we have antibiotics though, but we don't always have answers such as why marmots Why and one twenty twenty four paper title different characteristics of the soil and marmot habitats might be one of
the factors influencing your Cinia pestis. So the preferred soil and the mineral content may make things ripe for fleas and plague, as is our increasingly venus like atmosphere. And for more on that you can see the twenty twenty three paper titled Climate driven Marmot Plague Dynamics in Mongolia and China, which this paper bursts fourth from behind the curtains with jazz hands.
It opens. The incidence of plague has rebounded in the Americas, Asia and Africa alongside rapid globalization and climate change. And if you're wondering what's the most delicious way to contract the plaque, I'd have to say boodog, which is a traditional Mongolian barbecue method. It involves tucking hot stones into the carcass of the mammal and then cooking it from the inside out. It's really just an analog to a
microwave hot pocket, but it's got more pure ingredients. Because we have a treatment for plague, but we don't really have treatments for ultra processed foods and microplastics. More on those later actually, but yes, while there may be more than one way to skid a groundhog, a lot of them might involve fleas looking for a new hot host
like yourself. Also, if you love bloodsuckers, we have a two part episode on ticks and tickborn illnesses, as well as a two parter on vampire lore and so do you have to make sure that the fleas are killed on them?
If they've got people do with pradog in the planes where they study them, blacktail preadye dogs in Colorado is they douse every trap with per marith and I think that sort of kill the fleas and they still get it.
Have you gotten plague? Do you know people that have gotten plague?
Yeah?
What do you take antibiotic?
Yeah? Yeah, I mean as long as you know that you're exposed to it, you're probably gonna be Okay, Like, can.
You imagine just being like.
Hiey, I came home with the plague.
From a prairie dog. Okay, so it already sounds like your fieldwork is bananas. How often are you out and about in the field. I also just out of the corner of my eye saw that you have a Marmot's license plate from Kansas? Is it was that from your car?
And Colorado and California and California.
The best ologists, I feel like their license plate is their study species. Like we had a toothologist squids license plate. There's a guy I've been trying to get on who's in the remote reaches outside of Albuquerque who studies skunks. Lisus plate skunks. So so I do feel like that is the highest, Like that's top tier ologist.
I'm not going in the skunk ologist car.
I know it's this poor subaru outback is probably choking its way down the road. But when it comes to your your field work, has it taken you all over? And is it taken you to Paksatani phil Like have you been to groundhowk celebrations.
Ah, that's a sore point. I have not been to Poksatani.
Shocking.
Yeah, I know it is, I, you know, wants to hang out with a bunch of drunk people in top hats or whatever. But the good but well it's cold. But ye, with climate change, maybe I will go to Pusatani because it'll be warmer soon in the winter the last Yeah, I've worked all over the world. I'm been incredibly blessed to work pretty much everywhere, and I've worked with eight of the you know, fifteen species of marmots all around the Northern hemisphere.
What do you think of grand hok kay?
I think it's an opportunity to celebrate animal behavior and educate people about animals and have a good time.
So for years, Dan's lab has hosted, of course, Groundhog Day parties at the university and at one point has been interviewed by the La Times on how to celebrate it. He told one newspaper outlet that his souarees involve science geeks at his UCLA lab gathered to nibble, schmooze and revel in groundhoggery in all its magnificent splendor. Okay, so what is happening in Groundhog's Day? They are hibernating? Are they in a burrow?
Like?
How deep are these groundhogs chilling out?
So Groundhog Day? So, I mean, you know, culturally, we build holidays on previous holidays, and Groundhog Days half the way between winter solstice and spring equinox, and the Pagans had a holiday to sort of celebrate the coming of spring. And I guess in you know, northern Europe, they realized their hibernators around there, and they were living close to hedgehogs, and hedgehogs hibernate, so you know, they were using hedgehogs as this idea of predicting how long the rest of
the winter would be. So when the Pennsylvania Deutsch the Germans came to Pittsburgh area, they were looking for an analogy and they realized that woodshogs groundhogs were hibernating and maybe they could be predict the winter. But the idea is that if it's sunny, then there must be a high pressure system. So if the groundhog sees its shadow, it's sunny, there's a high pressure system. Things probably aren't
changing that much and then winter will continue. If it's cloudy in the groundhog doesn't see a shadow, you know, then maybe the weather things are changing and maybe spring will come early. Does it work? Does a coin flip work? Yeah? I mean, you know, get the data. And by the way, there are competing groundhogs now. So puckstani fil has been taken over by we aren't Willy and all of these other groundhogs. Truth.
Okay, So a rural town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is called punk Satani. And in this town there's a place called Gobbler's Knob. And I'm watching as much heated rivalry as the rest of you. But trust me, this was actually just named for the presence of Turkey's on a small knoll. But on Gobbler's Knob is a tree stump, and at the bottom of that tree stump is a small door, and locals and tens of thousands of tourists gather around February second, starting around three am, or if
they're properly socially lubricated. I hear that people just don't go to bed. And then it's seven to twenty am on February second. A man in a top hat knocks on the small stump door with a cane and out comes a groundhog named Phil. And then the man holds up the groundhog like an infant messiah and translates the groundhog's meteorological prognostication. And the man holds this betoothed rodent to his ear to translate from its native language. Now, if it's cloudy out and there is no sunny shadow
to be seen. Then that means that weather fronts are changing and spring will come sooner. Now, if he does see his shadow, it means winner's going to continue. And punk Satani Phil, although captive groundhogs can live past fourteen years, is well over one hundred years old because these top hadded locals meet with him in the summer and they give him a sip of a lixer of life, which
makes him immortal. Now, what is actually happening, some scientists agree, is that they swap out the woodchuck when one dies. They even us girl groundhogs, which in the wild would not be getting out of hibernation early because they're horny, but they deserve to have the job anyway. It's a high profile and respected position. But when the groundhog is not forecasting, Punk satani Phil lives at the local library in a plexiglass enclosure with his wife Phyllis and their
young children. Now, how eerily accurate are these predictions?
Isn't it weird?
We can ask a rodent about how many weeks of cold winter we have to endure? Well, the data doesn't lie when it comes to weather prediction. Groundhogs defy logical odds in the majority of years, the groundhog is wrong. They're wrong more often than they're right. It's over sixty percent rowness. Like it's worse than a coin toss. It doesn't even make sense. But other than having like no route in science or weather, does groundhog Day ever go awry? Of course it does. Of course it does. It's a
groundhog in public. One mayor in twenty fifteen put his ear up to translate the message from groundhog ease, as they say, and the groundhog bit his ear lobe on camera. Another time, a groundhog squirmed out of the arms of its handler. It hit the pavement. It later died. It's not an easy role to play. It takes a toll now. The public is not unscathed either. Past groundhog festivities have involved an open casket funeral of a groundhog eliciting whales
from onlooking children. There's been hot gossip, too, like Wyreton Willie, which was a white furred groundhog, was so rare he was nearly irreplaceable, and officials kept his twenty twenty death under wraps for nearly two years. He was dead one year and they tossed a hat out in the snow never explaining why, and they later had to say, like
he's dead, he had a successor. And then in twenty twenty three, that successor, it's widely assumed, was responsible for infanticide of his own children, who were found dead in their burrow. And then that was kept a secret for a while due to bad publicity. So Ontario's Wireton Willie has left a legacy of scandal. It's rocked the Marmot world and.
You know, then turned into a movie. I think about tracking down the source of what killed the groundhog?
Well, what did they find out?
I mean it died, Yeah, died.
What about Groundhog's Day? Bill Murray movies? Groundhogs Day freezing their butts off, waiting to worship a.
Rat men O'Connors. He's spending the day in Pucksatawny, Pennsylvania. I'm reliving the same day over.
Have you seen it more than once?
Of course I've seen it more than one.
Okay, just checking, just checking. I wasn't sure.
If you're like that was such a misrepresentation of groundhogs, Well.
I mean they chew their things and bite people, and you know they probably don't drive trucks. But I mean, really, it's a Buddhist movie. It's not about groundhogs, just.
About the living life over and over again.
And trying to improve over time. But I mean there's a New Yorker essay about this years ago about you know, oh well blah blah blah, you know, all major religions. So they see something in Groundhog Day about self discovering and improvement and being better to others. And so Groundhog Day is more of a metaphorical thing.
In the movie, you know, speaking of future past reliving, do you feel like you were destined to work on marmots or did you land into it accidentally.
I used to get paid the bicycle around the world world. I didn't get paid a lot. I mean, I had sponsors, you know, and this is before cell phones and influencers and things like that. So I just sort of wrote stuff and took pictures and got sponsors to help pay for my trips bicycling around the world. And I got into Davis for grad school. I didn't know what I
was going to study. I knew I wanted to just being international baby conservation, ye, but I also was really into behavior and I'm bicycling with an old girlfriend around. We tried a bicycle around India, nepoal package. We tried a bicycle around the Heimalayan car Korum. China blocked our attempts to places got into, you know, Nepal, and couldn't get over. They wouldn't let us in. So we bicycle
around the northern areas of Pakistan the car Korm. And so I get up to northern Pakistan and it's gorgeous and I find myself on the border with China, camping in a place called Kunjurab National Park. And there are marmots everywhere and they're super social, and there are foxes everywhere. There's SnO lepers. We didn't see them, and it's like the marmots were fighting the foxes off and away from them.
And I'm like, this is pretty cool, and I said, I wonder if I could, you know, study these guys here. So I ended up looking at any predator behavior and I was looking at any predator behavior of these guys and thinking about how do you think about the riskiness
of different behaviors cognitively. So I was doing experiments in northern Pakistan in the super intact predator community with these beautiful marmots and an uninhabited meadow, you know, up at fourteen three hundred feet, you know, dying and getting very strong.
Oh my god, do you steal bicycle a lot?
Now I'm I'm a slug.
No you're not. I was going to say, you look like you're out there doing a lot of field work.
I'm falling apart. My new Year's resolution is something I can achieve. I'm going to gain five pounds and start smoking cigars.
I'm going to start every morning with a martini.
And maybe every evening.
Yeah, just make it.
Lower the bar, lower the bar. Don't beat yourself up on resolutions. Do something you can achieve.
So we have pledged to absolutely ruin ourselves. But what about groundhog physique? Okay, talk to me a little bit about anatomy, because you mentioned that they have big ears, and for animals.
Animals that live in the cold, that's surprising to me. Would they lose a lot of heat?
I mean this is sort of an enthusiast's description, right, So groundhogs have relatively bigger ears than other ones. They're not rabbits, okay, not even pika. So no, they have pretty small ears.
But they are around and cute like a bear's which also helps them conserve heat. And for more on how bears do not truly hibernate, you can see our Arsenology episodes on bears or the Therm of Physiology episode with doctor Shane Campbell's stateton about body heat. And then how are groundhogs living? They're grumpy and they're solitary for the most part. Do they live in underground subway systems? Do they dig one burrow that they hang out in? Are they grabbing plants from the roots.
It's really hard to dig out of Marmlett borough. I spent a lot of time with engineers trying to design little things that motors that could go into Marmot boroughs. We failed completely because if you imagine in good habitat, maybe not woodchucks, groundhowks, but some of these more alpine ones, because most of them live in alpine areas. You know, a good marmot burrow is imagine dumping a dumb truck full of cinder blocks and then putting soil over that,
so you get these pinch points. And those pinch points, it turns out, are really important because all marmots pretty much are unfortunately prey to things that kill them from the sky, lightning bolts, eagles, hawks, if you're small, things that chase them, foxes and canids, cougars and snow leopards, badgers and bears. So you know they have to deal with all these forms of predation. In the long term study in Colorado, we've discovered that it's not about food
that influences where marmots are or where marmers persist. It's actually safety.
So location, location, location, neighborhood over local dining options.
The irony is when you think about a happy marmot in the end of the year, it's like a bread loaf, super fat, and I think of like a squeeze tube of them trying to squeeze through, you know, get away from badgers coming after them. So bottom line, I've not dug up burrows. People have excavated groundhog burrows, which are more soily areas or rooty areas, and you know they can be tens of feet tens of meters long. A
main burrow typically has multiple entrances. They may have a hybernacula in that but in their territory, in their home range, they have escape burrows as well, and some individuals may have multiple main burrows.
You need to know that a groundhog burrow has a better layout than my house. There are ample winding hallways.
They've got a toilet chamber complete with layers of grass like an eco friendly composting toilet. There is a room for sleeping with a grass mattress organic Usually, they got a nursery for the kiddos. They have a walk in pantry for food storage. At different times of the year, a groundhog may offer affordable housing to its neighbors, like
skunks or a writhing clot of garter snakes. There are booby traps in the form of dead end tunnels to fool predators who get disoriented like they're on the set of Severance. The front entrance of a burrow is a tidy mound of dirt swept out of their fine homes. This driveway they build also affords the groundhog's a little panoramic view to take in the sunset with a cocktail, or keep an eye out for things that want to
kill them. During their hibernation, males get up earlier than the females, and then they go door to door hoping to bone or they get into tooth fights with other marmot hotties.
What's really funny watching them come out in the spring sometimes of the snow. If you're really lucky, we ski around in the spring, the happiest time of the year, and you know, we go where we know the marmots are hibernating, and all it is is a blanket of snow, and then one day there might be a hole, and if we're really lucky, we know where the burrows are. Kind of we're looking, looking, looking on the snow covered slope and suddenly a hole appears, a nose appears, and
a bunch of fleas fly out of the burrow. I've seen that a couple times. So that's sort of imagine emergence. Now, if I lived surrounded by my fleas all winter, what would I do? The first thing? What would you do? You go find a new burrow? Yeah, sometimes they use different burrows after they emerge.
What are they eating to get so big? They're vegan and they're underground. How are they getting so chunky? Are they eating roots?
They don't need anything underground. They basically eat above ground stuff, okay, and they don't typically drink. They get their moisture through vegetation that they're eating. So if there's a killing frost in October or September, that pretty much kills the vegetation, dries things out, and then they probably hibernate after that.
Do they ever just run out of fuel hibernating?
Yeah, there's over winter mortality is a huge source of mortality. Only fifty percent of marmot babies born in one year will be alive the next year. And they emerge and if it's a good year, if there's a lot of insulation in the snow and they have a good burrow and whatever, they come out and they're fat. I mean, they haven't lost a lot of weight over winter. If it's still a snow covered which it is some years, you watch them waste away and lose weight because there's
nothing to eat. So getting up too early is can be costly if there isn't the food for them needs.
Have you ever thought, for publicity reasons to launch a fat groundhog Week?
No, I would launch a fat Marmot Week. We've talked about that, but by the end of the season, my team is so burned out. We have a five month fields season. I'm there about two and a half months. We should do that. It's like Everyone's like, I want to go home. Yeah, you know, but yes, we at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory where I work, we're talking about starting a Fat Marmot Week.
I feel like you should when would be peak time.
For that September, But that's when we have to come.
Back and teach and right your dance cards a little full.
Right.
Yeah, you need to, Holly. You need to get a social media person on it, just to be like one person that wants to launch Fat Marmot Week. There must be someone. I have so many questions from listeners. Can I ask them?
Sure?
Okay, and I will ask them, but not before a quick break for sponsors in the show who make it possible to donate to a cause of theologist choosing and this week it's going to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, which is home to one of the largest animal migrations of field biologists. They provide logistical support for scientists and students, including access to living quarters, research laboratories, and protected research sites.
And in a rapidly changing world, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory sustains our quality of life by accelerating discoveries about the ecosystems that replenish the world's air, water, and food supplies. Perhaps our donation can go toward social media for Fat Marmot Week, so a donation will go to them, thanks to sponsors to the show who make that possible. Okay, listener questions submitted via patreon dot com sooshologies, where you also can join for as little as a dollar a
month and support the show. So let's burrow into your mail bag. Let's gorge on your questions. Francesca Huggins lives in Kentucky.
Hi Ali.
I live in Louisville, Kentucky, and right by the Ford Plant there is a hill that's about a block long and about six feet tall, and it is host to what I can only describe as a commune of groundhogs. My daughter and I are always racing to see who can count how many we see, and we've seen twenty two on that hill at one time. It's also crazy that none of them ever seem to have been hit
by cars. I've never seen any roadkill groundhogs on that road, thankfully, So I'm just wondering if this number of groundhogs is pretty common for a community, and also how they managed to stay so safe in such an industrial area.
Are they living in condos of twenty two groundhogs?
So groundhogs are not that social. Okay, So if you have a good meadow, you can have lots of mothers with their kids sticking around, but then pretty much everyone disperses away. Maybe they settle in that meadow and maybe it's just a really good space for them to live. Maybe they don't have dogs eating them or coyotes. But groundhogs per se are not supposed to be that social. We can have in a meadow, you know, sixty animals,
and that's the facultatively social one species. The more social ones you'll have in life argalpine meadows, you'll have a family group with ten to twenty individuals, and other family groups ten to twenty individuals, et cetera, et cetera. So groundhogs often are more spread out in that. But again, what's a mass If something ranges from two point five to five kilos, you know, from six to twelve or fifteen pounds a year, how big are groundhogs? What's a
group size? If groups are varying constantly. I study social behavior, I don't know what a social group is. I mean, is it who emerges from hibernation? Is it, which is kind of what we use in many cases, is it when the yearlings disperse and the babies are up? I mean,
what's the social group when things are so much in flux. Yeah, we like to come up with easy ways to describe things, But I think studying marmots makes you think about a number of things, And one of those things is the sort of relativistic nature of how we study things.
They get makeovers internally every year, right, they kind of they're reborn, and then they go back into I feel like there's Buddhism in that too.
Right, you know, there's Buddhism everywhere. To start looking for it.
Like if you've been feeling awfulately. One of the Buddhist for noble truths is what's called duca, which stems from a root, meaning a loose axle on a cart or having a bumpy ride, and duca means pain or suffering or just general unise. Maybe seeking something that won't last,
like a dopamine hit. We all know about that. Some say that loneliness is a form of duca, and in twenty twenty three, US Health and Human Services issued a report titled are Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, and it noted that loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling. It harms both individual and societal health. It's associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety,
and premature death. It continues, the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day, and even greater, and not associated with physical inactivity. So for human organisms such as yourself, Dan says.
Not being super social is about as costly for your longevity as smoking. So we study the socially plastic species Yellow Belied Morments. Turns out that many ways we're looking at sociality. The more social animals are, the less likely they are to survive. The shorter they live, the less reproductive success they have, particularly for females. So there are some benefits of sociality, but we're also finding lots of costs of being too socially integrated with others. Is that
what's that? Do? Yeah?
Like, if you are too socially integrated, does it? What risks are there?
Well, you're less likely to survive the winter, you're more likely to die over hibernation, maybe because if everyone is having a good time over the summer, they interfere with each other's hibernation over the winter. And maybe we don't know. We want to put instruments in them and understand that. Yeah, haven't many able to get funded for that. That if you're social and you stick around and don't disperse, you're
likely to be reproductively suppressed. That nice girls finish last if you're a marmot, and that as you get older, you get crotchetier and you get more successful. So that's don't follow that in life either. Don't be a marmot.
Okay, how about their love lives?
Ashton McCall, Madeline Fox, Savannah Stark, Mark Rubin, Josie Olsen. They want to know, Josie says, do groundhogs mate for life? How many groundhog babies do groundhogs have in one litter? And you said they were called pups? Is that correct?
Pups?
But yeah, Madeline Fox wants to know. Are they good parents? I'm sure good is relative? Do they eat their baby?
So everything I say you should not bring into your own life. But at the end of the day, marmots do everything, and different species do different things, So I'm not going to talk about groundhogs per se. I'm going to talk about some of the variation we see in marmots. So groundhogs mate probably with one male, maybe two might be trying to defend them. But females more or less live alone, and they probably have one male defending them. And maybe they mate with a couple, but that's because
the males aren't successfully defending the females. They don't have a lot of paternal care, but there is muternal care for sure. In some cases, fathers might stick around and help a little more, but who knows. However, the yellow bellied marmots, which are these facultatively intermediately social, socially plastic species, kind of do everything. Sometimes in small habitat patches, we have one female with one male and they live in a monogamous life. In some cases, the females there and
the males galvanting around and visits her and whatever. In some cases the male hibernates with the babies and the wife, in other cases they don't. In some cases the moms die and the kids can make it through alone. When we look at the female's perspective. Often successful big groups are big because females recruit more young to hang out with them. What does that mean? They let their daughters stick around, their sons pretty much all disperse and some
of the male stick around. So then you have these multi female matra lines, a matrilineal social organization, mother and her offspring. And in those cases we see all sorts of interesting things. Sometimes we see co nursing. Sometimes we have lots of tension. We have mothers varying quite a bit in how quote good they are. Some ignore their kids, others are very attentive to their kids. Being attentive to your kids doesn't really help if you're living around a fox.
The fox will kill all your kids. Is reproductive suppression, whereas mothers are preventing younger daughters from reproducing. So a lot of the things we're studying in the Yellow Bellied barments are that sociality isn't necessarily good, but they're sort of forced into it. In terms of mating, sometimes there are multi male groups, and in multi male groups, pretty much everything happens. We have one male defending all of
the females and meeting with all of them. We have one male defending subsets, males defending subsets of females and meeting with them. And then we have mixed paternity.
What is mixed paternity exactly?
So it's one litter that contains kind of a grit, a bag full of siblings and half siblings. And if you would allow me to read from the Journal of Mammalogy paper Mating system and Paternity in Woodchucks, which says that animals seek copulations out of sight not only of their social mates, but also of scientific observers. And it continues that multiple paternity occurred in sixty three percent of litters, and overall, woodchucks in this natural population could be classified
as quote genetically promiscuous. And if you're wondering how researchers keep track of who is who and all of these love triangles like watching this season premiere of a dating show. So the methodology section of the paper notes that quote, we used a small artist brush and commercial hair dye claial balsam color to apply a unique mark to each
animal's hindquarters. And I also looked it up in the shade of balsam is like a medium ash brown, offering superior gray coverage and they have to use that because there's no commercial dye that is just from.
Our Mixed paternity is not uncommon in mammals, so we can have that in yellow bellies. The other thing that the most successful males males typically have a ten year of about two years the most successful male. So the whole idea called reproductive skew, and reproductive skew is you know who's getting it, And in females there's not a lot of skew. I mean, there is a little bit, but I mean if you're alive and a breeder, you're getting it. But males it's a lot more difficult to
get it. And if you think about elephant seals for example, you know, like one male elephant seal has all these females on the beach and you know, fights them to death and has all the reproductive success. Right, So the most successful males have had hundreds of babies because they live more than two years and they start screwing their kids. Oh no, don't try that at home.
So then does that lead to a lot of birth?
There is in breeding that we can detect and it's not good for them. But from a female's perspective, if there's only one male around, she has no choice.
Better to do a Greek tragedy of some sort.
Most of them make it, some don't, So something's better than nothing in the game of fitness. My favorite couple mid Blood. I think he lived to eleven, and he was this old, gray, grizzled guy. I watched him emerge one April. We had a blizzard and that was his last year. I never saw him after the blizzard, and he was stiff and whatever. But for a number of years and he was one of the most successful males we've ever had. And he used to have a whole section of the valley, and by the end of his
life he had thirteen ninety nine. This grumpy female and his daughter. He was a sweetheart. Some males are just like rough and whatever. He would go up and greet her and she would smack him in the face, and you know, then he would like go and chase his daughter because he could. But you know, it's just so Greek tragedy. I don't know tragedy absolutely from his perspective.
Let's keep talking, crotches. Tell me one wait, anal genital instinct, genitals, Okay, tell me about that.
So one of the more interesting studies I've done that really woke up me to the consequences of modern pollution and particularly plastic pollution, is a marmot story. So it turns out that if you're a mammal, you know you're If you're a male, you have a penis and an anis, and those are a distance away. If you're a female, you have vagina and anis, and those are closer to each other. So people, maybe people like me, measure something
called anogenital distance. Now, it also turns out that if you're a rodent, you have lots of siblings, and you can imagine all the babies all in the uterus to uteri like a pee, and then the pea pods are the babies growing up. And a guy named Frederick wm Saal was looking at the development the effect of hormones on development and with mice. Mice did little caesarean sections and figured out where the babies came from in their uterine horn in their uterus, and females surrounded by two
males became more masculinized. So it also turns out if you're a mammal, you start off feminized and have to be defeminized, and you get defeminized by having little bursts of testosterone when you're in utero that begin sexual differentiation. So he found that natural variation in the location you were in that peapod influenced what you were exposed to your siblings around you. The testosterone leaked through and females became more masculinized, the distance between their vagina and their
anus increased. I mean, you can try this at home and measure people if you want. But you know Grundle studies, so we didn't know. We are not doing cesareans on these marments. We study them in the wild. But a former post doc, Roquel Monklas, said, well, you're measuring it in general. Just go yeah, Like I want to sort of start analyzing this data set. I'm like yes. And what we discovered is that we could look at emergence
sex ratio. So we don't know marmots are born, they probably live about twenty eight days in the borough and are nursing, and then they emerge after about twenty eight thirty days and they're more or less weaned. And we don't know who died in the borough, and we don't know who was absorbed and reabsorbed. So the Russians who've studied all these you know, marmots, have found all sorts of really interesting reabsorption of embryos. So there's all sorts of maternal control over what's going on.
So, yes, mammal embryonic anatomy starts out female and then it d females, and many female mammals have more reproductive options than humans in some countries.
Any event, we catched pups as soon as they emerge, so we can say, you know, of six babies, five were males and one was a female, so that is a male biased litter. Or four were females and two were males, that is a female biased litter. So it turns out that females in male biased litters are more androgenized, they have a greater antigenital distance, they engage in more sort of rough play and male like baby behavior pup behavior. They are more likely to disperse, But if they don't disperse,
they're less likely to breed as two year olds. So here is natural variation in hormones. We had some people from Berkeley, some toxicology lab who used to work at Rumble and said, oh yeah, send me some Mormot bloods. They send us mormint blood. They said, we can find no evidence of chemical pollutants in this blood. This is cleaner than polar bears or anything else we've studied in nature. We never published that, but Marmot blood should be the
new standard for non polluted blood. They're living in nature. So pause a moment and ask yourself a question. Plastic pollution. We're all ingesting plastics. Our sperm counts are going down. You know, we're having all sorts of enecological issues. Pollates which are found to make plastic saw turns out our testosterone mimicers. They mimic testosterone, the other plastic chemicals mimic estrogen.
We are so screwing up the environment. And if we see in a natural population that is not polluted, and we see natural variation having such profound effects on later behavior, survival, et cetera, reproductive success, you should be scared about what we're putting in the environment. And you know what this is doing for this follow your inner marmot. Marmots are sentinels of our health, and so.
The downstream effects could affect populations for eternity essentially, right, like if you have a if you have a populations that continue to be influenced hormonally.
Let's say I would worry about humans, I wouldn't worry about marmots.
Yeah, how is their blood so clean?
I don't know. They were looking for a bunch of toxins that are usually screened for, you know, chemical toxins, and oh man.
God, I feel like I'm half plastic in there. I know, I have no idea. Every time I read a new thing, I oh, well.
You know you shouldn't read so much. It's a really scary world out there.
So hormonal factors can impact behavioral changes and preferences. And we have an excellent neuro endochronology episode all about that will link for you. And keep in mind in these cases with marmots, this is with some of the cleanest plastic free blood scientists have come across. So given the known endocrine disruption caused by environmental toxins, you can see our environmental toxicology episode. It's anyone's guess how animals in
ecology will change more rapidly as pollution continues. And I'm also going to link a New York Times story published today January thirteenth, twenty twenty six, whose headline reads EPA to stop considering lives saved when setting rules on air pollution. In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limit and not on
the monetary value of saving human lives. Documents show so no matter how shrill we scream, hungry predators are out, there is a lot of the action and the drama happening underground or above ground. Like when you're trying to observe this, do you have camera traps and then you go from that, Like how.
We spend in an ordinate amount of time sitting looking for things, and we spend a lot of time just sitting and watching animals. We spend over a thousand hours a year just trying to look at what's going on above ground. In the spring, we can see things as the vegetation starts growing. It's harder to see things in the subalpine area we work in Colorado. In Pakistan, it was phenomenal, Like could sit on a ridge top and see like eight social groups in this meadow because there's
like no vegetation. It was the most amazing place to watch mormots and aside from being hypoxic all the time.
I was going to say, you need oxygen and SPF for that, a lot of SPF.
Yeah, do you have an SPF that you recommend the.
More of the merrier and use physical blockage.
Okay, so like you're you're working with the hats, you're working with.
You know, I used to surf a lot, and I'm an alpine biologist and I've been eurotic about the sun and I cover myself and now I'm just getting things carved off me, right.
I know it's that I'm at that age too where I'm like, they're gonna have to start getting a melon baller out. You can also see our Melanology episode for more on sun exposure and how and why your body makes pigments. Okay, mel Sarah Magnat, Kawasaka, Spencer hoyd Away, Protect trans Lives, Andrew Maurice Wuirld Tree riguero A, guy called Shane Mish the Fish, Abigail Bartel, first time question asker, Natalie Jy. I'm I'm trying to read these as fast
as I can. Michael Crosa, Steve Hansen, Matt Thompson, Madeline Fox, and Michelle garth.
How much wood could it? Wood?
Chuck? Chuck?
The woodchuck could chuck? Would do they chuck wood?
I have to I don't even know what chucking wood is.
Okay, thanks because neither of I said that.
Ken Armitage, who started this mormut project that I inherited, wrote a book on marmots and was looking into sort of Northeastern indigenous culture, and it was possible that woodchucks were called wooshiks by some particular group of people. So woodchuck came from wushik.
Oh, Okay, and that North American indigenous word is in the Cre dialect about gonquin. But groundhogs have this truly impressive number of nicknames, which I choose to believe means they're beloved. I feel like the more nicknames you have for someone, the more they live in your head. So feel free to call them woodchucks, ground pigs, rock chuck, rock chuck, weensuck, weienusk, land beaver, red monk, whistlepig, thick wood, badger, monas, moonach, Canada, marmot,
or earth howk. You can also call the juveniles chucklings, and a mob of groundhogs is a coterie or a repetition. Now, other things you can say, of course, are how much wood wood, wood chuck, chuck of a woodchuck?
Could chuck wood? Wood? Chucking wood? I always figured it meant do you know what chucking wood is?
No?
I figured it meant like wood shipping. But now I'm they're not beavers, I know. But then I'm wondering, do they are they chucking? Like throwing it? Maybe I don't. Yeah, you think it's throwing it. They don't throw wood, okay, So then the zero is if they could chuck though.
Well, I would like to chuck a lot of wood if I could.
I mean, I wonder if that would help to check a good amount until I tear a rotator couff sometimes, you know, I feel like it would be very cathartic. But I'm going to look into that and see if anyone has defined that.
But beams are the lumberjacks.
Of mature, all right, put the calculators away, nerds. Somebody already crunched the numbers for us. So in nineteen eighty eight, Richard Thomas, a wildlife bollogist from upstate New York, figured
this out. So, first off, no whistle pigs are tossing wood around, okay, but they are little excavating machines, and if they woke up on the right side of the bed had a big seven eleven coffee, they can toss up to thirty five cubic feet or like ten cubic meters of dirt in a day, which weighs in at around seven hundred pounds or three hundred and twenty kilograms in a day seven hundred pounds. So do not waste
natural resources by riddling chatchypt with this one. Also, legend has it if you were to ask Siri, she would say, well, since a woodchuck is really a groundhog, the correct question would be how many pounds in a groundhog's mound? When a groundhog pounds hog mounds, which is seven hundred pounds more wood than you can shake a stick up.
Alexis Cully Margo Hayes both want to know.
Margo says, why won't my dog stop trying to run down every single groundhog? She sees, I know you don't know this dog personally, but dogs in general?
What's going on there?
Doesn't everyone like to chase a squirrel?
I mean, I guess a lot of people it's wired in our brain to notice things and run after them.
So we have two corgi's. My wife's into agility, and the older corgi is pretty well trained in certain ways. But you know, he's like marmot, so he's like marmot. Oh, Marmott, I'll go find the marmot. So he chases the marmots. The marmots of course get back to the bros because he's a Corgi. Yeah, he doesn't hurt.
The marmots, is I think, as long as there's not taking a chomp. And we did a porcupine episode and our editor who lives in Canada said that they had a dog who was not very bright and went after the same dead porcupine in the woods twice and got quilled twice.
So we had marmots living under a cat. Porcupines, by the way, the populations are down pretty much throughout North America, which is really weird. And we used to have a lot of porcupines where I live. They eat. My dad in Colorado was pretty upset about that. Yeah, But at times we've had porcupines and marmots living under a cabin together, and at times I've had to take porcupine quills out of marmot faces.
Like they just figure like I'm going to crash here, You're going to crash here. I love porcupines, I do love them, and I love watching them eat, And yes we have a porcupine episode, and yes we include audio of them squeaky munching on items such as sweet potatoes and pumpkins and corn and speaking of your corkis Marta Wells wants to know? And so does the goblin prints. Marta asks, why aren't they pets like cats? Would they make good pets? Or do they pee on themselves a lot?
And you have to feed them a lot of tubers?
I mean I peel on myself a lot, you know. So I mean, you know I walked.
In here with Dallas pans.
That shouldn't be a criteria for having a pet. So the social ones make good pets. And a lot of people, a lot of people. There are Instagram feeds of people with house marmots, but researchers and colleagues of mine in Russia, many of them have had house marmots. And the social ones are super sweet, and you know, it can be trained and they can be taken care of a woman used to send me pictures and write me and call me sometimes from Utah in the mountains and had a marmot.
But then and she send me all these pictures. I think I have one around the corner of them eating laced potato chips and it's completely obese. It didn't hibernate. But then in the spring it disappeared and she calls me in tears one day and she's like, she left you know, why would she leave me? I'm like, well, maybe it was a coyote, or maybe she dispersed, because that's what they do, moments dispersed. Many of them disperse. But why would she leave me? It's very sad.
I love her. If you have a pet marmot, do you have to let them hibernate like you know how people bury their turtles in the winter. Do you have to give them like a freezer?
Uh No, you don't have to. And the people that have pets typically don't. They just let them get fat and feed them and maybe they sleep a little more. And I don't know pet them. And there's some Russians that have these amazing instagram of their marmots, and.
I've bet their wildlife rehabbers that do that too, right, taking an unreleasable market.
In North America, it is illegal to have wild animals as pets.
Just a disclaimer, So yes, if you want to have a woodchuck roommate, only certified wildlife rehabbers need apply. Same with possums and squirrels and raccoons, and yes we have an episode for each of those critters. Also, as I edited this episode, in my home that would be substandard for a groundhog. I had a fuzzy lump of woodchuck sized, potty trained doggie snoring on my lap. So just like get a dog or a cat, just get one of
those instead. And for more on those, we have a recent episode on Ethnosinology all about how dogs evolved from wolves. And of course we have a Pelinology episode and that covers why your cats deserve a second litter box and a heated blanket.
Our best buds, They're worth the trouble. What about from I Guess Pets to pest Adeline Burg, Elizabeth Sheeley, Ricky g Trishacy, Laura MacLean. When Vivian, Alex Hurtman and Brienna l want to.
Know, Alex said tips to keep them away from the garden. I have seen many a woodchuck raise a vegetable patch, which is fair for them, but sad for my salad. What do you do if you have a lot of backyard garden wood chucks?
What do you do?
Wouldn't you want to feed them? Wouldn't you want to sort of, you know, share your garden with the wildlife. Isn't this a teachable moment where you can aren't you blessed to have an animal that you can sort of look at up close and personal? Y? I?
Yes, yes you could mountain lion poop. Mountain lion poop? Okay?
Hey pee?
What about? Can you put stuff in cages? Can you grow your food in an upground? You know what I mean?
Years ago, so this was in the former Soviet Union and they were in Coazaks Center or something, and there was a nuclear facility they were trying to marmot proof, and it's like how deep does a fence have to go in order to and how high does it have to go? I'm like, I don't know. They can dig deep if they want, but it sort of depends. And we've talked about that for a while. Then at one of these Marmot meetings in Switzerland. We're at a place
called Marmot Paradise. It's above Montreaux and you take the train up and these people ski in the winter there, and the train makes money in the winter, and they wanted to make money in the summer, so they sort
of got marmots from all over the place. But I'm there at this conference and my colleague and friend from colorado's there and he's kept Greg Floran, he's kept marmots before, and he's looking at the fence and he knows snow and he's like, these marmots are going to emerge through a couple of meters of snow in the spring, and that fence isn't tall enough. Oh no, So we don't know if they lost the marmots.
It's like Jurassic Park, but with marmots kind of.
But I don't think Marmot's not veloci.
Raptors, right.
I wasn't going to follow up on this, but I need to let you know that this alpine destination, yes it's called Marmott Paradise, does not have the highest reviews. Let us read from the book of trip Advisor. One star, more like a high security prison than a paradise chain link fences topped with barbed wire. Poor marmots. If you are looking forward to the Marmots, you will be disappointed.
Another review, written in French, was titled scand'lous, meaning outrageous or disgraceful, and the review translated to read, there is only one Marmot left next to the restaurant, which seems to be bored and waiting for deliverance from death. Others wrote average for humans, hell for marmots, paradise for no one, absolutely horrendous, unworthy of anyone's life, and a final review led with smelly. The website reports thankfully Marmot's Paradise has
been permanently closed. I didn't see any reviews from the last few years, so I'm hoping all the critters are set free now for actual, wild, happy marmots. I understand that Washington's Mount Rainier is a prime destination. One social media post I saw explained that at Mount Rainier, I heard the sound of a little girl screaming. I ran to say the little girl it was a marmot. Of course, they write, but don't terrorize them. Just keep a distance, use a long lens. Don't give them any reason to
shriek in your presence. Let's keep it chill. But okay, speaking of teeth, I was thinking, like, we have gopher cages over some of our native plants because we're like we would sometimes see patches of poppies getting just like a bouquet snatched out of ground. So we're a constant war with our gophers. I'm curious you mentioned that.
They can choo through stainless steel, which is absolutely insane to me.
But like you choose through their welds, break the cages. That's crazy.
Can you if you had like a garden bed that had that kind of like mesh, you know, galvanized whatever, could they break that into that?
So behavior, and I'm really interested in human wildlife interactions and what we perceive as conflicts. And you know, if you can redefine what a conflict is, that's the best thing. If you really want to grow vegetables there, you're going to declare war. And you know they're the general thing is you make it harder for them to get to something, and you make it easy there for them to get to others. So maybe you have some sacrificial you know,
tulips or tubers for them. They don't need tubers, but I mean, you know, whatever for them to eat, and that might be good. And then you protect other stuff with fencing, and you can fence them out the same way you can fence der.
L Okay, Well, you mentioned they don't eat tubers.
Maybe they eat tubers, but maybe they do.
But in general Victoria's shape in metaline fox. Sarah vander Kleid, Sarah E. G.
And Shannon Germany want to know, Yeah, what kind of things do they eat? Shann wan to know do they eat bird eggs like grassland bird eggs.
They typically don't eat bird eggs. So some squirrels are much more omnivorous than marmots. So the marmots that I've looked at and read about, they're pretty much vegetarians, you know, the plants. They might eat some insects. You see insects in their poop, but that's probably incidental or you know, there isn't fantaside in some species. So when I say don't try this at home, don't do this at home either. I mean these more social species, the most social species,
there's bad stuff that happens. So males will come in and kill all the babies. Yeah, and then you know, chase away the male and then try to be the male for the next year, kind of like lions. Females sometimes engage in fantaside as well. It's a little less common, but there isn't obviously cannibalism associated with the in fantaside. It really seems to be reproductive competition in the males.
Female is not so sure. But the golden marmots I studied in Pakistan and fantaside was as important as predation for first summer mortality. Wow, got twenty five percent of the kids were killed by other marmots and about twenty five percent were probably killed by predators.
You know, people are fascinated by true crime, and I feel like it's got nothing on marmots.
Yeah, I mean, we mormits are soap op.
They're really like Dateline should just take up marmots if they really want to bring the drama. But what about Chelley Bean redhead? Scientists and Colby Evans want to know what prompts a groundhog to start digging? And how are they digging these tunnels and burrows? Are they ever popping into abandoned ones when it comes to home building, what tools do they have growing out of their bodies?
So, since we're talking about zen type statements, yeah, you know, my insight after a lot of study, was marmots are where they've been. Okay, just focus on that, find your inner eye. You know, marmots are where they have been. There are good areas and bad areas, and there's intergenerational
transfer of these burrows. So you know, on average, animals live about three and a half years four and a half years, they die and other ones did their descendants come in or sometimes new animals come in and take over the burrows when we've had huge population explosions. You see them dig new boroughs. These typically aren't good burrows. They probably get killed in them. The good play places where they're living are good places where they've lived before,
so they dig, they renovate. You see them digging with their claws. You see them moving rocks out with their mouth. You see them making piles. You see them pushing piles, you know, with their nose. So they're well equipped. They're rodents.
Do they have tails?
Of course they have tails.
What kind of tails do they have?
Well, they're not as bushy as a ground as tree squirrels, but they have a bushy tail and they use their tail for communication. And the long tailed marmot, the golden marmots. I studied the subspecies of the long tailed marmots really use their tails a lot.
What about groundhogs?
Groundhogs have tails, they use their tails.
This was a question from Ann Award, mel Justin Murphy, Strutwigic and at them foot. They want to know do groundhogs communicate with high pitched or low frequency tones or both? They say, I feel like I've heard them squeak, but underground it seems like low vibrations would work better. Stratwigic wanted to know, I'd like to hear the whistle of a whistle pig and why this usually solitary creature vocalizes. How are they communicating? Is it chirps and whistles?
Is it tails?
So in an incredible about of good luck, when I was just finishing my PhD and I was using alarm calls to scare marmots to understand how their attention was compromised, to understand the risks of being engaged in different behaviors. When you're playing, you're focusing on your play partner, not on predators. It's risky. Play is risky, so therefore you play next to your burrow. I said, I really want
to study the evolution of alarm calling in marmots. People were saying, oh, well, referential communication is something you want to study word like communication, and I'm like, marmots are a great system to study the evolution of this, And I wrote a postdoc proposal and got funded to go around the world and continue studying marmot screams and whistles
and chirps and whatever. So the first thing you should realize is don't believe anything you read, because I was unable to find any strong evidence that they have word like communication. They communicate risk a variety of different ways, which are super cool. Some call more, some call faster. But it's not as though they have one type of whistle or chirp for an aerial predator and one type
for a terrestrial predator, as do verveant monkeys. Ververant monkeys are pretty cool, as do chickens, as do a lot of some species, not all. Some primates, not all primates have word like communication for different sorts of predators. They may label them, but they communicate a lot of different risk a lot of different ways. The Vancouver Island marmot almost one extinct, down to less than fifty in captivity, now up to about three hundred and something four hundred
something in the wild. Major an ongoing conservation work trying to keep those guys alive, had five different alarm calls. And not only that, they probably had simple syntax in that when I did playbacks where I would vary the order of calls, they responded differently. No, so who knows, almost one extinct. We almost lost knowledge of language by losing the Vancouver Island mornment, which looks like a bear cub in this absolutely adorable.
Was it habitat loss? Was it hunting? What? Did it?
A combination of hyal pine logging, which so they only lived on Vancouver Island high pine logging seemingly brought them down suboptimal habitat and associated with the logging roads. Vancouver Island has a remarkably rich wolf and cougar population, and the cougars and wolves were eating them, and they would go along the logging trails eat them. So it was a bad scene.
And their alarm calls did not save them from wolves or loggers.
We have a paper on yellow bellied marmots that sort of suggests that those who call more die younger. So calling doesn't seem to be a good personal thing to do, but it may help others.
Oh, loose lips sink ships.
Loose lips sink ships.
Oh man, what's a big myth about a marmot or a groundhog that you're so sick of having to bust? Or maybe you're thrilled to bust a myth about it?
Did they chuck wood?
That's top of the list, top of list.
There's no woodchucking that happened even if they could. What about what's something that sucks about your job?
I love my job. I have the best job in the world. So getting funding for it, I mean I'm getting fun. So I'm running this long term study. We've just finished our sixty fourth year. We're planning our sixty fifth year of studying this individually identified population of marmots in Colorado. They can't get funding. I was blessed by having eleven years of NSF support for this long term research stuff, and we were trying to get renewals, and
the program officer said, we will never fund you. Yeah. Yeah, And we're asking questions that no one else, very few people can ask that this project has been so productive. It's been so effective at educating people, in training people, and in coming up with biological and evolutionary insights that you don't get from, you know, short term studies.
And we just can't get funded even when you're at a place like UCLA, like a top school.
Well, well it shouldn't matter the school you're at it out of the science you're doing. I think we're doing good science. It's very, very frustrating, And then I don't know How'm going to keep this thing going. Yeah, and I feel really obligated to keep it going because my colleague and late friend Ken Armor's just part of this thing. It's the second longest study of individually marked mammals in the world. The Chimpanzees of the Gombie, which Jane Goodall started,
was is quote the longest. These long term studies, of which there are many, are priceless. Many of them fail, many of them don't get passed on between generations, many of them die when the person retires. Yet the insights we get from these are profound, and they're really important. This is how we understand life around us. If we want to understand plasticity, if we want to understand how life, whether it's plant life or animal life, you know, is
going to respond to a increasingly variable world. We need long term studies where we see different epics of selection, and marmots are one of these, really you know, good long term studies.
It's interesting too that we you know, with this Groundhog's Day being such a holiday involving meteorology and climate and culture, that there's not something so obvious to most people that ecology and environment and climate are all very intertwined and they can tell us something about the other.
You know, I'm clearly not effective at writing proposals for pure review. Good at writing papers, but proposals aren't working.
We're going to start with fat Marmot week, Fat Marmot week, and that's the ferd, that's the entre into it. Get Some billionaires have a pet project, is I guess what we all that's our only hope is a soft hearted billionaire, which is we know it doesn't exist. But what about the thing you love the most? I mean, I know you love your job. So many people can't say that they've seen all of these places good at the top of Alpine summit.
So I mean, basically, you have to follow your inner marmot. That's my advice. I follow my inner marmot regularly and it takes me good places and they experience and interesting things and meet interesting people like today. But you know, I love handling pups because them big marmots. We don't knock our animals out. We put them in handling bags and then we try to get blood from them. We try to get mouth swabs, and we try to put marks on them. We can study them and we don't
hurt them, and that's a good thing. But the babies you can hold in a hand and if you're holding it right, you don't get bitten.
How small are they?
They fit in your hand like the sort of grip.
Them like a baby rabbit kind of.
Uh yeah, a little longer.
Oh my gosh.
We sometimes smaller.
Oh my gosh. I want to see a pop I r l.
Oh you do. So what you want to do is you want to do a field biology ologies and come to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and see a bunch of you know, science geeks at work.
Oh my god, I'm there. Oh, this has been so wonderful. I have from the start again whistle pigs, woodchucks, groundhogs. Didn't know the difference, and I feel like I am leaving here knowing what a barm it is and I love them.
Marmots are cool.
So ask groundhog people groundbreakingly not smart questions because they have dug up the research, they have the answers. Thank you so much to doctor Blumstein for being on hand to open your office to the curiosities of me and our listeners. Via patreon dot com slash ologies, you two can join first Lilosa Dollar months in stemate Questions. You can find out more about Dan and his lab at
the link in the show notes. We'll also link to his charity of choice, as well as our website at aliwar dot com slash Ologies slash Marmatology, which we'll have so many links to studies and videos of groundhogs eating fruit. We're at ologies on blue Sky and Instagram. I'm at ali Ward on both. You can get merch via ologiesmerch dot com. We have shorter kids Save Classrooms save versions of ologies called smologies SMO L O g I E. S. You can subscribe to for free wherever you get podcasts.
Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook group. Avelene Malick makes our professional transcripts.
Kelly R.
Dwyer does a website nudging me out of hibernation and into the studio as scheduling producer Noel Dilworth. Our top headed MC is managing director Susan Hale, and the audio experts putting my pig whistles together are Chake Chafee as director and lead editor, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, Nick thorburn squeaked us the theme music, and if you stick around to the very end of the show, I tell you a secret.
I burden you with that.
And this week, first off, the transcription software that we use cannot spell Marmots. It either corrected it to marmite or Mormons, which was particularly on savory when writing about the mating and the childcare habits of these creatures. But the other secret is that doctor Sarah McNulty of the Toothology Squid episode is in town and staying at our groundhog Den. And it's her birthday this coming Friday, January sixteenth.
So if you were hearing this before then again Friday, January sixteenth, whish her a happy one on Instagram Blue sky You can also maybe throw five or ten bucks her way for her nonprofit Skype as Scientist, which is doing great work. One of the things I got her is a perfume that is based on the follttle organic compounds in squidding. So I'm excited to take awhiff. I think, Okay,
gather your friends for Groundhog Day because it's midwinter. Isolation and phone addiction caused by billionaire media conglomerates are killing us. So put on mittens, eat some veggies, stare at each other's shadows. Instead, Southern hemisphere remembers subscrite okay, bryebye, pacodermatology, homology or doo zoology, lithology, new zeology, meteorology and old pedatology, ethnology, seriology, elinology.
This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel
Predicting the weather.