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Speaker 1: Ali Ward and this is Ologies, this is big squirrels.
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Speaker 1: Okay, so marmatology. The word marmot goes back to the
Speaker 1: Latin root meaning mountain mouse. And this week we have
Speaker 1: a true expert. They did their undergrad at the University
Speaker 1: of Colorado Boulder and then went to U See Davis
Speaker 1: for a master's and a PhD in animal behavior. They
Speaker 1: are now a researcher and a professor at UCLA's Department
Speaker 1: of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. They've spent years and years
Speaker 1: and years studying a complex communication of marmots and integrating
Speaker 1: that into conservation efforts to influence environmental policy. And on
Speaker 1: a rainy January day here in La a few weeks ago,
Speaker 1: I got over to the university to lobso questions. First,
Speaker 1: just got to UCLA. I'm here to interview the groundhog expert.
Speaker 1: I got out of my car and I spilled twenty
Speaker 1: ounces of cold iced tea onto my crotch. It's so soaked,
Speaker 1: like it's not a little wet, it's soaked like I
Speaker 1: had hosed myself off.
Speaker 2: This is what happens when you do interviews in person.
Speaker 2: Really never know what you're gonna get. Hey, I'm Alie,
Speaker 2: you waiting for me? Sorry about my pants.
Speaker 1: We're already off to a memorable start. But clearly our
Speaker 1: ologist and the lovely hollyob in UCLA Media Relations, they
Speaker 1: were chill.
Speaker 2: They were down to clown.
Speaker 1: We went up to his office where he has all
Speaker 1: sorts of skulls and marmot art, even a roadkill groundhog
Speaker 1: that he and his wife, Janice taxidermied themselves, and we
Speaker 1: chatted all about the rodent de jour, including how and
Speaker 1: why we celebrate Groundhog's Day. The Buddhism and paganism of
Speaker 1: the midwinter slump, Romantic advice you should not take from
Speaker 1: a marmot what they are singing into the wind. How
Speaker 1: to coexist with one in your garden. Why they don't
Speaker 1: get stressed about holiday binging, The real estate layout of
Speaker 1: a groundhog layer. What to do if you want a
Speaker 1: marmot as a pet, Why they're blood boggled. Science and
Speaker 1: the wandering etymology behind their aliases with animal behaviorist, conservationist,
Speaker 1: field biologist, professor and marmatologist doctor Daniel Blumstein, and Blumstein
Speaker 1: hee him right, Okay, this is news to me as
Speaker 1: of about fifteen minutes ago.
Speaker 2: A groundhog is a woodchuck.
Speaker 3: There are fifteen species of Marmotsky groundhogs are one of
Speaker 3: those species. An other name for groundhogs or woodchucks.
Speaker 2: I had no idea. I thought they were different animals.
Speaker 3: We have a holiday named after them, and it said
Speaker 3: about behavior and climate and weather and what's not to
Speaker 3: love about woodchucks.
Speaker 2: The fact that they are a ven diagram that is
Speaker 2: just one circle is astounding me. What about whistle pig?
Speaker 3: What's up with that? Whistle pig is a common name
Speaker 3: for some marmots. Okay, people call yellow bellied mormentus whistle pigs,
Speaker 3: but in general, woodchucks are the least social of the
Speaker 3: fifteen species of marmots. Babies emerge and then disperse. In
Speaker 3: their first year of life, they may settle around their mom.
Speaker 3: And my friend and colleague Chris Mayer at the University
Speaker 3: of Maine is studying woodchuck behavior in detail, and it's
Speaker 3: shown that there's a little more sociality than most people
Speaker 3: think about when they look at woodchucks. But the other
Speaker 3: species are more social. So I study yellow bellied marmots,
Speaker 3: which are socially plastic. And what's really interesting about that
Speaker 3: allows us to understand the dynamics of you know, what's
Speaker 3: good about being social? Not a lot of things for marmots.
Speaker 3: We can get into that. The rest of the species
Speaker 3: are much more social, and the kids stick around for
Speaker 3: a couple of years, and in some cases there's mothers
Speaker 3: are mating with sons to keep them around and alpine marmots.
Speaker 3: You know, you should not use marmots as a model
Speaker 3: for our behavior. There's all sorts of sort of stuff
Speaker 3: going down with marmots. You really want to know I'm.
Speaker 1: Doing so a groundhog is the type of marmot. Yes,
Speaker 1: not all marmots are groundhogs. The cactus succulent. Correct, Right,
Speaker 1: what's the range of size? Because I picture a groundhog,
Speaker 1: I picture it like a beefy cat.
Speaker 3: They're all about cat size.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: The Himalayan marmot Marmoda Himalaniana robusta. I think the robusta
Speaker 3: it's not like a beer or a coffee. It's because
Speaker 3: it's big. But most of them are sort of cat
Speaker 3: sized animals. But what's the size? I mean they double
Speaker 3: their mass every.
Speaker 2: Year, right, every year they double.
Speaker 3: They hibernate marmots are the biggest of the true hybrid bears.
Speaker 3: Don't hibernate bears. Estivate bears can't lose enough body heat
Speaker 3: to properly hibernate, so marmots lose their body heat. Not
Speaker 3: only that, we did a study where we borrowed animals
Speaker 3: from the wild, brought them back to the lab, hibernated them,
Speaker 3: put them back to the wild when we're done with them,
Speaker 3: and it turns out they actively suppress their metabolism and temperature,
Speaker 3: which is super interesting. Yellow bellied marmots are incredibly efficient
Speaker 3: hibernators in big ones and the end of the year
Speaker 3: are about five kilos, which is pretty big. That's a
Speaker 3: big cat. They burn when they're in deep torpor. A
Speaker 3: gram of fata day, a gram.
Speaker 2: Of fata day, so they got to get chunk up
Speaker 2: before they hibernate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they So basically, biomedical researchers study mormits in part
Speaker 3: to understand how you can be obese without having health consequences.
Speaker 3: So they don't get all the things that we get
Speaker 3: if we eat like a marmot. Actually marmots are vegetarians,
Speaker 3: so maybe we should eat like is.
Speaker 2: It a difference between white fat and brown fat?
Speaker 3: Well, they have both. And my friend who did the
Speaker 3: researcher on this walter aren't old formally in Germany. It
Speaker 3: said no, it got more complex than that. But I'll
Speaker 3: say the sort of dumb down version that I can understand,
Speaker 3: and that is that if you're a hibernator, you have
Speaker 3: to put on two types of fat. You have to
Speaker 3: put on heating oil and you have to put on insulation.
Speaker 3: So one of them is easier to burn during the
Speaker 3: winter for heating oil, and the other provides that insulation.
Speaker 3: So what's really interesting is you know, you might think
Speaker 3: it's easy to study what an animal eats, It's actually
Speaker 3: really hard to study when an animal eats. When you
Speaker 3: begin thinking about that, these guys are looking for specific
Speaker 3: fatty acids, so they eat plants. But plants aren't plants
Speaker 3: aren't plants, and different parts of the same plant have
Speaker 3: different fatty acid compositions. So what they're eating, the specific
Speaker 3: fatty acids they're eating in a particular ratios are important
Speaker 3: for putting on these different sorts of body fat.
Speaker 2: And walk me back to what exactly is a marmot?
Speaker 2: Is it a rodent? Is it a what is.
Speaker 3: A market Well, I would say that the king of rodents,
Speaker 3: but copy are the kings of rodents. I love copy bara,
Speaker 3: But marmots are the kings of the ground squirrels. So
Speaker 3: they're related to prairie dogs and ground squirrels a little
Speaker 3: less related to tree squirrels. There are lots of species
Speaker 3: of ground squirrels around the northern hemisphere and some in
Speaker 3: the southern hemisphere. Prairie dogs are only in North America,
Speaker 3: and marmots have a whole Arctic distribution. They're found around
Speaker 3: the northern hemisphere but not in the southern hemisphere, so heads.
Speaker 2: Up a marmot.
Speaker 1: In general, it's a big, huge ground squirrel that can
Speaker 1: weigh up to fifteen pounds or seven kilograms. It can
Speaker 1: be up to two feet long, and there's about fifteen
Speaker 1: or so species.
Speaker 2: They're among those. There are little guys, but overall they
Speaker 2: live mostly in North America and Eurasia. They're a bit
Speaker 2: docks and like they have cute little legs. They have
Speaker 2: a furry little tail if you like charismatic rodents. Also
Speaker 2: you can enjoy our Scurritiology episode about squirrels and our
Speaker 2: Cape Bearra episode in which we discuss the Pope's decision
Speaker 2: to class by them as a fish. And then what
Speaker 2: about groundhogs.
Speaker 3: Groundhogs have a really interesting distribution. I think they go
Speaker 3: down into Georgia and they sort of go a swath
Speaker 3: across North America and end up in Fairbanks, Alaska. So
Speaker 3: this asocial grumpy marmot and they're a little bigger than
Speaker 3: other species. Because they're not efficient hibernators. They lose weight
Speaker 3: really quickly, so they get really fat and they lose
Speaker 3: a lot of weight. And groundhogs areally cue. They have
Speaker 3: really big ears. You look at them. I'm like, that's
Speaker 3: a groundhog.
Speaker 1: And a groundhog is one of the larger, chunkier marmots
Speaker 1: with this briskly brownish fur. It's got a medium length tail.
Speaker 1: It looks kind of like a quaka having a bad day,
Speaker 1: just pissy. And Dan also studies yellow bellied marmots, which
Speaker 1: they are not known for their cowardice. I went down
Speaker 1: some marmot holes and the origin of that phrase is
Speaker 1: widely debated, but it may come from like an old
Speaker 1: timey imbalance of humors, meaning someone is jaundice, which is which,
Speaker 1: So that's kind of mean.
Speaker 2: It's pretty cold, speaking.
Speaker 3: Of marmots, curl up into And when we hibernated the marmits,
Speaker 3: it was super interesting. And why was it super interesting
Speaker 3: Because we went in and we had a power outage,
Speaker 3: just like, oh, we better weigh them. And we went
Speaker 3: into the hibernation room and pulled them out and they're
Speaker 3: wound up in a tight little ball and they feel
Speaker 3: like a fuzzy rock. They were cold, they were hard
Speaker 3: and stiff, and they were fuzzy. And I don't know
Speaker 3: if you've been to the Dead Sea, but it's sort
Speaker 3: of the same. This doesn't fit my view of physics. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the dead sea. You walk into the dead sea and
Speaker 3: you sit down and you're sitting in the water and floating.
Speaker 3: That doesn't fit any fit. Picking up a living furry
Speaker 3: stone is not in the physics that I've been taught.
Speaker 2: How low does their body temperature get?
Speaker 3: So there are ground squirrels, artic ground squirrels that can
Speaker 3: get their body temperature below zero celsius, below thirty two.
Speaker 3: They have anti freeze. Pretty cool?
Speaker 2: Is anyone studying groundhogs for like biomedical applications.
Speaker 3: People are doing nasty things to groundhogs to understand, you know,
Speaker 3: obesity and how you can be obese without having problems
Speaker 3: of obesity. Because they get obese every year they double
Speaker 3: their masks. They have to put on fat and energy
Speaker 3: in order to not eat for seven or eight months.
Speaker 3: Marmots are kings of escape in captivity. So Marmot meetings
Speaker 3: you go and you hang out with all these people
Speaker 3: from all over the former Soviet Union order the Soviet
Speaker 3: Union at the time, depending upon when you went. And
Speaker 3: one guy and they were using him in Russia Soviet
Speaker 3: Union for bioweapons research because they harbor some diseases. A
Speaker 3: lot of them have plague in Europe. But then they
Speaker 3: have other things as well. So this one guy was like,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, my KGB colonel came to me one day
Speaker 3: and said, you know, if the marmots break out one
Speaker 3: more time, you will be fired. You know. So when
Speaker 3: we brought these into captivity to borrow them to hibernate them,
Speaker 3: we put them in stainless steel welded rabbit cages and
Speaker 3: the first thing they did was break the stainless steel
Speaker 3: wells and break out. So now they're running around this
Speaker 3: environmental chamber room and we have to catch them, and
Speaker 3: they wouldn't hibernate. And my colleague, late Ken Armitage, who
Speaker 3: started this long term study that I now try to
Speaker 3: keep going. My colleague, basically, we're banging our heads together.
Speaker 3: Why are they hibernating? We've turned off the lights, we've
Speaker 3: turned down the temperature. What's going on? And he came
Speaker 3: in one morning and he had an insight, and his
Speaker 3: insight was, oh, maybe we need to give them bedding.
Speaker 3: So they put in some paper towels and the next
Speaker 3: day they were all curled up and hibernating. They made
Speaker 3: their little beds, they curled up, they hibernated, and that
Speaker 3: was it.
Speaker 2: Well, the mattress is soft. Are they getting through steel?
Speaker 3: They're rodents. They have teeth and they use them. I'm
Speaker 3: not putting my fingers into their mouth. Animals bite because
Speaker 3: I've been bitten by marmots, yes, you know, and so
Speaker 3: Marmo's bite.
Speaker 2: Have you ever gotten stitches from a marmot?
Speaker 3: I'm not gotten stitches, but I'm probably an error what's
Speaker 3: probably viewed as an erroneous data point in some CDC database,
Speaker 3: if there is a CDC anymore. Because I got bitten
Speaker 3: by a hibernating mormant because we had the power outage
Speaker 3: and picking them out, and the baby, a pop that
Speaker 3: was going through his first hibernation. It was about a
Speaker 3: kiloh and a half. That was very cute, and I
Speaker 3: was cuddling it and it had woken up enough that
Speaker 3: it just took a chunk out of my finger. So
Speaker 3: I went to the er for that one.
Speaker 2: Oh, do you have to worry about any in the
Speaker 2: US like plague or Rabi's or anything like that.
Speaker 3: Rabies maybe there's been one groundhog maybe, you know, but
Speaker 3: they don't really have rabies. Plague is an issue, but
Speaker 3: it's not an issue yet, really, so plague came over
Speaker 3: from Eurasia. And the reason prey dogs have been so
Speaker 3: decimated by plague is because they didn't evolve with it.
Speaker 3: Marmots have evolved with plague, the Eurasian ones have, at least,
Speaker 3: so their populations go up and down and they sort
Speaker 3: of deal with that. There's a really interesting story about that.
Speaker 3: I'll tell you in a second. Right now, We're lucky,
Speaker 3: but I study them in Gunnison County, Colorado, and Gunnison
Speaker 3: County has gunnism pride dogs, and I'm really concerned and
Speaker 3: that periodically plague comes and knocks out all the preye dogs.
Speaker 3: You know, if you're studying prairie dogs, you get plague. Wow,
Speaker 3: you people get plague. You study paradogs. But you know that,
Speaker 3: so you do things to sort of you're aware of
Speaker 3: your symptoms. Sometimes you're dousing them with insecticides things like that.
Speaker 1: Let's just take a quick relaxing break from the horrors
Speaker 1: of the news cycle to learn about the plague. So,
Speaker 1: marmots have fleas, and fleas can carry plague, which is
Speaker 1: an illness caused by a bacterium known as your Sinea pestis.
Speaker 1: It's named after pestilence and a nineteenth century French Swiss
Speaker 1: biologist named Alexandra Eerson.
Speaker 2: Don't worry.
Speaker 1: You can get many different types of plaque, such as bubonic,
Speaker 1: which produces big, festering lumps in your lymph nodes. You
Speaker 1: can get septiscemic, which gets into your blood. You can
Speaker 1: even get lung plague called pneumonic plague. You can spread
Speaker 1: that to others by coughing and stuff. Symptoms of these
Speaker 1: three vary, but overall you'll get headaches, weakness, a fever, chills, pneumonia,
Speaker 1: bulbous growths, and your extremities may turn black, gish purple.
Speaker 1: And the Black Death taking place in the mid thirteen
Speaker 1: hundreds wiped out up to fifty million Europeans, or about
Speaker 1: half the continent's population.
Speaker 2: Thanks Flees. It also took five.
Speaker 1: Hundred years to figure out what bacterium was responsible, and
Speaker 1: our buddy Alexandra finally figured it out by, according to
Speaker 1: our other friend Wikipedia, obtaining specimens after bribing English sailors
Speaker 1: responsible for disposing of the bodies of plague victims. Since
Speaker 1: the plague never really left us, so we have antibiotics though,
Speaker 1: but we don't always have answers such as why marmots
Speaker 1: Why and one twenty twenty four paper title different characteristics
Speaker 1: of the soil and marmot habitats might be one of
Speaker 1: the factors influencing your Cinia pestis. So the preferred soil
Speaker 1: and the mineral content may make things ripe for fleas
Speaker 1: and plague, as is our increasingly venus like atmosphere. And
Speaker 1: for more on that you can see the twenty twenty
Speaker 1: three paper titled Climate driven Marmot Plague Dynamics in Mongolia
Speaker 1: and China, which this paper bursts fourth from behind the
Speaker 1: curtains with jazz hands.
Speaker 2: It opens. The incidence of plague has rebounded in the Americas,
Speaker 2: Asia and Africa alongside rapid globalization and climate change. And
Speaker 2: if you're wondering what's the most delicious way to contract
Speaker 2: the plaque, I'd have to say boodog, which is a
Speaker 2: traditional Mongolian barbecue method. It involves tucking hot stones into
Speaker 2: the carcass of the mammal and then cooking it from
Speaker 2: the inside out. It's really just an analog to a
Speaker 2: microwave hot pocket, but it's got more pure ingredients. Because
Speaker 2: we have a treatment for plague, but we don't really
Speaker 2: have treatments for ultra processed foods and microplastics. More on
Speaker 2: those later actually, but yes, while there may be more
Speaker 2: than one way to skid a groundhog, a lot of
Speaker 2: them might involve fleas looking for a new hot host
Speaker 2: like yourself. Also, if you love bloodsuckers, we have a
Speaker 2: two part episode on ticks and tickborn illnesses, as well
Speaker 2: as a two parter on vampire lore and so do
Speaker 2: you have to make sure that the fleas are killed
Speaker 2: on them?
Speaker 3: If they've got people do with pradog in the planes
Speaker 3: where they study them, blacktail preadye dogs in Colorado is
Speaker 3: they douse every trap with per marith and I think
Speaker 3: that sort of kill the fleas and they still get it.
Speaker 2: Have you gotten plague? Do you know people that have
Speaker 2: gotten plague?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: What do you take antibiotic?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, I mean as long as you know that
Speaker 3: you're exposed to it, you're probably gonna be Okay, Like, can.
Speaker 2: You imagine just being like.
Speaker 3: Hiey, I came home with the plague.
Speaker 2: From a prairie dog. Okay, so it already sounds like
Speaker 2: your fieldwork is bananas. How often are you out and
Speaker 2: about in the field. I also just out of the
Speaker 2: corner of my eye saw that you have a Marmot's
Speaker 2: license plate from Kansas? Is it was that from your car?
Speaker 3: And Colorado and California and California.
Speaker 2: The best ologists, I feel like their license plate is
Speaker 2: their study species. Like we had a toothologist squids license plate.
Speaker 2: There's a guy I've been trying to get on who's
Speaker 2: in the remote reaches outside of Albuquerque who studies skunks.
Speaker 2: Lisus plate skunks. So so I do feel like that
Speaker 2: is the highest, Like that's top tier ologist.
Speaker 3: I'm not going in the skunk ologist car.
Speaker 1: I know it's this poor subaru outback is probably choking
Speaker 1: its way down the road. But when it comes to
Speaker 1: your your field work, has it taken you all over?
Speaker 1: And is it taken you to Paksatani phil Like have
Speaker 1: you been to groundhowk celebrations.
Speaker 3: Ah, that's a sore point. I have not been to Poksatani.
Speaker 2: Shocking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know it is, I, you know, wants to
Speaker 3: hang out with a bunch of drunk people in top
Speaker 3: hats or whatever. But the good but well it's cold.
Speaker 3: But ye, with climate change, maybe I will go to
Speaker 3: Pusatani because it'll be warmer soon in the winter the
Speaker 3: last Yeah, I've worked all over the world. I'm been
Speaker 3: incredibly blessed to work pretty much everywhere, and I've worked
Speaker 3: with eight of the you know, fifteen species of marmots
Speaker 3: all around the Northern hemisphere.
Speaker 2: What do you think of grand hok kay?
Speaker 3: I think it's an opportunity to celebrate animal behavior and
Speaker 3: educate people about animals and have a good time.
Speaker 1: So for years, Dan's lab has hosted, of course, Groundhog
Speaker 1: Day parties at the university and at one point has
Speaker 1: been interviewed by the La Times on how to celebrate it.
Speaker 1: He told one newspaper outlet that his souarees involve science
Speaker 1: geeks at his UCLA lab gathered to nibble, schmooze and
Speaker 1: revel in groundhoggery in all its magnificent splendor. Okay, so
Speaker 1: what is happening in Groundhog's Day? They are hibernating? Are
Speaker 1: they in a burrow?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 2: How deep are these groundhogs chilling out?
Speaker 3: So Groundhog Day? So, I mean, you know, culturally, we
Speaker 3: build holidays on previous holidays, and Groundhog Days half the
Speaker 3: way between winter solstice and spring equinox, and the Pagans
Speaker 3: had a holiday to sort of celebrate the coming of spring.
Speaker 3: And I guess in you know, northern Europe, they realized
Speaker 3: their hibernators around there, and they were living close to hedgehogs,
Speaker 3: and hedgehogs hibernate, so you know, they were using hedgehogs
Speaker 3: as this idea of predicting how long the rest of
Speaker 3: the winter would be. So when the Pennsylvania Deutsch the
Speaker 3: Germans came to Pittsburgh area, they were looking for an
Speaker 3: analogy and they realized that woodshogs groundhogs were hibernating and
Speaker 3: maybe they could be predict the winter. But the idea
Speaker 3: is that if it's sunny, then there must be a
Speaker 3: high pressure system. So if the groundhog sees its shadow,
Speaker 3: it's sunny, there's a high pressure system. Things probably aren't
Speaker 3: changing that much and then winter will continue. If it's
Speaker 3: cloudy in the groundhog doesn't see a shadow, you know,
Speaker 3: then maybe the weather things are changing and maybe spring
Speaker 3: will come early. Does it work? Does a coin flip work? Yeah?
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, get the data. And by the way,
Speaker 3: there are competing groundhogs now. So puckstani fil has been
Speaker 3: taken over by we aren't Willy and all of these
Speaker 3: other groundhogs. Truth.
Speaker 1: Okay, So a rural town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is
Speaker 1: called punk Satani. And in this town there's a place
Speaker 1: called Gobbler's Knob. And I'm watching as much heated rivalry
Speaker 1: as the rest of you. But trust me, this was
Speaker 1: actually just named for the presence of Turkey's on a
Speaker 1: small knoll. But on Gobbler's Knob is a tree stump,
Speaker 1: and at the bottom of that tree stump is a
Speaker 1: small door, and locals and tens of thousands of tourists
Speaker 1: gather around February second, starting around three am, or if
Speaker 1: they're properly socially lubricated. I hear that people just don't
Speaker 1: go to bed. And then it's seven to twenty am
Speaker 1: on February second. A man in a top hat knocks
Speaker 1: on the small stump door with a cane and out
Speaker 1: comes a groundhog named Phil. And then the man holds
Speaker 1: up the groundhog like an infant messiah and translates the
Speaker 1: groundhog's meteorological prognostication. And the man holds this betoothed rodent
Speaker 1: to his ear to translate from its native language. Now,
Speaker 1: if it's cloudy out and there is no sunny shadow
Speaker 1: to be seen. Then that means that weather fronts are
Speaker 1: changing and spring will come sooner. Now, if he does
Speaker 1: see his shadow, it means winner's going to continue. And
Speaker 1: punk Satani Phil, although captive groundhogs can live past fourteen years,
Speaker 1: is well over one hundred years old because these top
Speaker 1: hadded locals meet with him in the summer and they
Speaker 1: give him a sip of a lixer of life, which
Speaker 1: makes him immortal. Now, what is actually happening, some scientists agree,
Speaker 1: is that they swap out the woodchuck when one dies.
Speaker 1: They even us girl groundhogs, which in the wild would
Speaker 1: not be getting out of hibernation early because they're horny,
Speaker 1: but they deserve to have the job anyway. It's a
Speaker 1: high profile and respected position. But when the groundhog is
Speaker 1: not forecasting, Punk satani Phil lives at the local library
Speaker 1: in a plexiglass enclosure with his wife Phyllis and their
Speaker 1: young children. Now, how eerily accurate are these predictions?
Speaker 2: Isn't it weird?
Speaker 1: We can ask a rodent about how many weeks of
Speaker 1: cold winter we have to endure? Well, the data doesn't
Speaker 1: lie when it comes to weather prediction. Groundhogs defy logical
Speaker 1: odds in the majority of years, the groundhog is wrong.
Speaker 1: They're wrong more often than they're right. It's over sixty
Speaker 1: percent rowness. Like it's worse than a coin toss. It
Speaker 1: doesn't even make sense. But other than having like no
Speaker 1: route in science or weather, does groundhog Day ever go awry?
Speaker 1: Of course it does. Of course it does. It's a
Speaker 1: groundhog in public. One mayor in twenty fifteen put his
Speaker 1: ear up to translate the message from groundhog ease, as
Speaker 1: they say, and the groundhog bit his ear lobe on camera.
Speaker 1: Another time, a groundhog squirmed out of the arms of
Speaker 1: its handler. It hit the pavement. It later died. It's
Speaker 1: not an easy role to play. It takes a toll now.
Speaker 1: The public is not unscathed either. Past groundhog festivities have
Speaker 1: involved an open casket funeral of a groundhog eliciting whales
Speaker 1: from onlooking children. There's been hot gossip, too, like Wyreton Willie,
Speaker 1: which was a white furred groundhog, was so rare he
Speaker 1: was nearly irreplaceable, and officials kept his twenty twenty death
Speaker 1: under wraps for nearly two years. He was dead one
Speaker 1: year and they tossed a hat out in the snow
Speaker 1: never explaining why, and they later had to say, like
Speaker 1: he's dead, he had a successor. And then in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, that successor, it's widely assumed, was responsible for
Speaker 1: infanticide of his own children, who were found dead in
Speaker 1: their burrow. And then that was kept a secret for
Speaker 1: a while due to bad publicity. So Ontario's Wireton Willie
Speaker 1: has left a legacy of scandal. It's rocked the Marmot
Speaker 1: world and.
Speaker 3: You know, then turned into a movie. I think about
Speaker 3: tracking down the source of what killed the groundhog?
Speaker 2: Well, what did they find out?
Speaker 3: I mean it died, Yeah, died.
Speaker 2: What about Groundhog's Day? Bill Murray movies? Groundhogs Day freezing
Speaker 2: their butts off, waiting to worship a.
Speaker 3: Rat men O'Connors. He's spending the day in Pucksatawny, Pennsylvania.
Speaker 3: I'm reliving the same day over.
Speaker 2: Have you seen it more than once?
Speaker 3: Of course I've seen it more than one.
Speaker 2: Okay, just checking, just checking. I wasn't sure.
Speaker 1: If you're like that was such a misrepresentation of groundhogs, Well.
Speaker 3: I mean they chew their things and bite people, and
Speaker 3: you know they probably don't drive trucks. But I mean, really,
Speaker 3: it's a Buddhist movie. It's not about groundhogs, just.
Speaker 2: About the living life over and over again.
Speaker 3: And trying to improve over time. But I mean there's
Speaker 3: a New Yorker essay about this years ago about you know,
Speaker 3: oh well blah blah blah, you know, all major religions.
Speaker 3: So they see something in Groundhog Day about self discovering
Speaker 3: and improvement and being better to others. And so Groundhog
Speaker 3: Day is more of a metaphorical thing.
Speaker 1: In the movie, you know, speaking of future past reliving,
Speaker 1: do you feel like you were destined to work on
Speaker 1: marmots or did you land into it accidentally.
Speaker 3: I used to get paid the bicycle around the world world.
Speaker 3: I didn't get paid a lot. I mean, I had sponsors,
Speaker 3: you know, and this is before cell phones and influencers
Speaker 3: and things like that. So I just sort of wrote
Speaker 3: stuff and took pictures and got sponsors to help pay
Speaker 3: for my trips bicycling around the world. And I got
Speaker 3: into Davis for grad school. I didn't know what I
Speaker 3: was going to study. I knew I wanted to just
Speaker 3: being international baby conservation, ye, but I also was really
Speaker 3: into behavior and I'm bicycling with an old girlfriend around.
Speaker 3: We tried a bicycle around India, nepoal package. We tried
Speaker 3: a bicycle around the Heimalayan car Korum. China blocked our
Speaker 3: attempts to places got into, you know, Nepal, and couldn't
Speaker 3: get over. They wouldn't let us in. So we bicycle
Speaker 3: around the northern areas of Pakistan the car Korm. And
Speaker 3: so I get up to northern Pakistan and it's gorgeous
Speaker 3: and I find myself on the border with China, camping
Speaker 3: in a place called Kunjurab National Park. And there are
Speaker 3: marmots everywhere and they're super social, and there are foxes everywhere.
Speaker 3: There's SnO lepers. We didn't see them, and it's like
Speaker 3: the marmots were fighting the foxes off and away from them.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, this is pretty cool, and I said,
Speaker 3: I wonder if I could, you know, study these guys here.
Speaker 3: So I ended up looking at any predator behavior and
Speaker 3: I was looking at any predator behavior of these guys
Speaker 3: and thinking about how do you think about the riskiness
Speaker 3: of different behaviors cognitively. So I was doing experiments in
Speaker 3: northern Pakistan in the super intact predator community with these
Speaker 3: beautiful marmots and an uninhabited meadow, you know, up at
Speaker 3: fourteen three hundred feet, you know, dying and getting very strong.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, do you steal bicycle a lot?
Speaker 3: Now I'm I'm a slug.
Speaker 2: No you're not. I was going to say, you look
Speaker 2: like you're out there doing a lot of field work.
Speaker 3: I'm falling apart. My new Year's resolution is something I
Speaker 3: can achieve. I'm going to gain five pounds and start
Speaker 3: smoking cigars.
Speaker 2: I'm going to start every morning with a martini.
Speaker 3: And maybe every evening.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just make it.
Speaker 3: Lower the bar, lower the bar. Don't beat yourself up
Speaker 3: on resolutions. Do something you can achieve.
Speaker 1: So we have pledged to absolutely ruin ourselves. But what
Speaker 1: about groundhog physique? Okay, talk to me a little bit
Speaker 1: about anatomy, because you mentioned that they have big ears,
Speaker 1: and for animals.
Speaker 2: Animals that live in the cold, that's surprising to me.
Speaker 2: Would they lose a lot of heat?
Speaker 3: I mean this is sort of an enthusiast's description, right,
Speaker 3: So groundhogs have relatively bigger ears than other ones. They're
Speaker 3: not rabbits, okay, not even pika. So no, they have
Speaker 3: pretty small ears.
Speaker 1: But they are around and cute like a bear's which
Speaker 1: also helps them conserve heat. And for more on how
Speaker 1: bears do not truly hibernate, you can see our Arsenology
Speaker 1: episodes on bears or the Therm of Physiology episode with
Speaker 1: doctor Shane Campbell's stateton about body heat. And then how
Speaker 1: are groundhogs living? They're grumpy and they're solitary for the
Speaker 1: most part. Do they live in underground subway systems? Do
Speaker 1: they dig one burrow that they hang out in? Are
Speaker 1: they grabbing plants from the roots.
Speaker 3: It's really hard to dig out of Marmlett borough. I
Speaker 3: spent a lot of time with engineers trying to design
Speaker 3: little things that motors that could go into Marmot boroughs.
Speaker 3: We failed completely because if you imagine in good habitat,
Speaker 3: maybe not woodchucks, groundhowks, but some of these more alpine ones,
Speaker 3: because most of them live in alpine areas. You know,
Speaker 3: a good marmot burrow is imagine dumping a dumb truck
Speaker 3: full of cinder blocks and then putting soil over that,
Speaker 3: so you get these pinch points. And those pinch points,
Speaker 3: it turns out, are really important because all marmots pretty
Speaker 3: much are unfortunately prey to things that kill them from
Speaker 3: the sky, lightning bolts, eagles, hawks, if you're small, things
Speaker 3: that chase them, foxes and canids, cougars and snow leopards,
Speaker 3: badgers and bears. So you know they have to deal
Speaker 3: with all these forms of predation. In the long term
Speaker 3: study in Colorado, we've discovered that it's not about food
Speaker 3: that influences where marmots are or where marmers persist. It's
Speaker 3: actually safety.
Speaker 2: So location, location, location, neighborhood over local dining options.
Speaker 3: The irony is when you think about a happy marmot
Speaker 3: in the end of the year, it's like a bread loaf,
Speaker 3: super fat, and I think of like a squeeze tube
Speaker 3: of them trying to squeeze through, you know, get away
Speaker 3: from badgers coming after them. So bottom line, I've not
Speaker 3: dug up burrows. People have excavated groundhog burrows, which are
Speaker 3: more soily areas or rooty areas, and you know they
Speaker 3: can be tens of feet tens of meters long. A
Speaker 3: main burrow typically has multiple entrances. They may have a
Speaker 3: hybernacula in that but in their territory, in their home range,
Speaker 3: they have escape burrows as well, and some individuals may
Speaker 3: have multiple main burrows.
Speaker 2: You need to know that a groundhog burrow has a
Speaker 2: better layout than my house. There are ample winding hallways.
Speaker 1: They've got a toilet chamber complete with layers of grass
Speaker 1: like an eco friendly composting toilet. There is a room
Speaker 1: for sleeping with a grass mattress organic Usually, they got
Speaker 1: a nursery for the kiddos. They have a walk in
Speaker 1: pantry for food storage. At different times of the year,
Speaker 1: a groundhog may offer affordable housing to its neighbors, like
Speaker 1: skunks or a writhing clot of garter snakes. There are
Speaker 1: booby traps in the form of dead end tunnels to
Speaker 1: fool predators who get disoriented like they're on the set
Speaker 1: of Severance. The front entrance of a burrow is a
Speaker 1: tidy mound of dirt swept out of their fine homes.
Speaker 1: This driveway they build also affords the groundhog's a little
Speaker 1: panoramic view to take in the sunset with a cocktail,
Speaker 1: or keep an eye out for things that want to
Speaker 1: kill them. During their hibernation, males get up earlier than
Speaker 1: the females, and then they go door to door hoping
Speaker 1: to bone or they get into tooth fights with other
Speaker 1: marmot hotties.
Speaker 3: What's really funny watching them come out in the spring
Speaker 3: sometimes of the snow. If you're really lucky, we ski
Speaker 3: around in the spring, the happiest time of the year,
Speaker 3: and you know, we go where we know the marmots
Speaker 3: are hibernating, and all it is is a blanket of snow,
Speaker 3: and then one day there might be a hole, and
Speaker 3: if we're really lucky, we know where the burrows are.
Speaker 3: Kind of we're looking, looking, looking on the snow covered
Speaker 3: slope and suddenly a hole appears, a nose appears, and
Speaker 3: a bunch of fleas fly out of the burrow. I've
Speaker 3: seen that a couple times. So that's sort of imagine emergence. Now,
Speaker 3: if I lived surrounded by my fleas all winter, what
Speaker 3: would I do? The first thing? What would you do?
Speaker 3: You go find a new burrow? Yeah, sometimes they use
Speaker 3: different burrows after they emerge.
Speaker 2: What are they eating to get so big? They're vegan
Speaker 2: and they're underground. How are they getting so chunky? Are
Speaker 2: they eating roots?
Speaker 3: They don't need anything underground. They basically eat above ground stuff, okay,
Speaker 3: and they don't typically drink. They get their moisture through
Speaker 3: vegetation that they're eating. So if there's a killing frost
Speaker 3: in October or September, that pretty much kills the vegetation,
Speaker 3: dries things out, and then they probably hibernate after that.
Speaker 2: Do they ever just run out of fuel hibernating?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's over winter mortality is a huge source of mortality.
Speaker 3: Only fifty percent of marmot babies born in one year
Speaker 3: will be alive the next year. And they emerge and
Speaker 3: if it's a good year, if there's a lot of
Speaker 3: insulation in the snow and they have a good burrow
Speaker 3: and whatever, they come out and they're fat. I mean,
Speaker 3: they haven't lost a lot of weight over winter. If
Speaker 3: it's still a snow covered which it is some years,
Speaker 3: you watch them waste away and lose weight because there's
Speaker 3: nothing to eat. So getting up too early is can
Speaker 3: be costly if there isn't the food for them needs.
Speaker 2: Have you ever thought, for publicity reasons to launch a
Speaker 2: fat groundhog Week?
Speaker 3: No, I would launch a fat Marmot Week. We've talked
Speaker 3: about that, but by the end of the season, my
Speaker 3: team is so burned out. We have a five month
Speaker 3: fields season. I'm there about two and a half months.
Speaker 3: We should do that. It's like Everyone's like, I want
Speaker 3: to go home. Yeah, you know, but yes, we at
Speaker 3: the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory where I work, we're talking
Speaker 3: about starting a Fat Marmot Week.
Speaker 2: I feel like you should when would be peak time.
Speaker 3: For that September, But that's when we have to come.
Speaker 2: Back and teach and right your dance cards a little full.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you need to, Holly. You need to get a
Speaker 2: social media person on it, just to be like one
Speaker 2: person that wants to launch Fat Marmot Week. There must
Speaker 2: be someone. I have so many questions from listeners. Can
Speaker 2: I ask them?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 1: Okay, and I will ask them, but not before a
Speaker 1: quick break for sponsors in the show who make it
Speaker 1: possible to donate to a cause of theologist choosing and
Speaker 1: this week it's going to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory,
Speaker 1: which is home to one of the largest animal migrations
Speaker 1: of field biologists. They provide logistical support for scientists and students,
Speaker 1: including access to living quarters, research laboratories, and protected research sites.
Speaker 1: And in a rapidly changing world, the Rocky Mountain Biological
Speaker 1: Laboratory sustains our quality of life by accelerating discoveries about
Speaker 1: the ecosystems that replenish the world's air, water, and food supplies.
Speaker 1: Perhaps our donation can go toward social media for Fat
Speaker 1: Marmot Week, so a donation will go to them, thanks
Speaker 1: to sponsors to the show who make that possible. Okay,
Speaker 1: listener questions submitted via patreon dot com sooshologies, where you
Speaker 1: also can join for as little as a dollar a
Speaker 1: month and support the show. So let's burrow into your
Speaker 1: mail bag. Let's gorge on your questions. Francesca Huggins lives
Speaker 1: in Kentucky.
Speaker 2: Hi Ali.
Speaker 5: I live in Louisville, Kentucky, and right by the Ford
Speaker 5: Plant there is a hill that's about a block long
Speaker 5: and about six feet tall, and it is host to
Speaker 5: what I can only describe as a commune of groundhogs.
Speaker 5: My daughter and I are always racing to see who
Speaker 5: can count how many we see, and we've seen twenty
Speaker 5: two on that hill at one time. It's also crazy
Speaker 5: that none of them ever seem to have been hit
Speaker 5: by cars. I've never seen any roadkill groundhogs on that road, thankfully,
Speaker 5: So I'm just wondering if this number of groundhogs is
Speaker 5: pretty common for a community, and also how they managed
Speaker 5: to stay so safe in such an industrial area.
Speaker 2: Are they living in condos of twenty two groundhogs?
Speaker 3: So groundhogs are not that social. Okay, So if you
Speaker 3: have a good meadow, you can have lots of mothers
Speaker 3: with their kids sticking around, but then pretty much everyone
Speaker 3: disperses away. Maybe they settle in that meadow and maybe
Speaker 3: it's just a really good space for them to live.
Speaker 3: Maybe they don't have dogs eating them or coyotes. But
Speaker 3: groundhogs per se are not supposed to be that social.
Speaker 3: We can have in a meadow, you know, sixty animals,
Speaker 3: and that's the facultatively social one species. The more social
Speaker 3: ones you'll have in life argalpine meadows, you'll have a
Speaker 3: family group with ten to twenty individuals, and other family
Speaker 3: groups ten to twenty individuals, et cetera, et cetera. So
Speaker 3: groundhogs often are more spread out in that. But again,
Speaker 3: what's a mass If something ranges from two point five
Speaker 3: to five kilos, you know, from six to twelve or
Speaker 3: fifteen pounds a year, how big are groundhogs? What's a
Speaker 3: group size? If groups are varying constantly. I study social behavior,
Speaker 3: I don't know what a social group is. I mean,
Speaker 3: is it who emerges from hibernation? Is it, which is
Speaker 3: kind of what we use in many cases, is it
Speaker 3: when the yearlings disperse and the babies are up? I mean,
Speaker 3: what's the social group when things are so much in flux. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we like to come up with easy ways to describe things,
Speaker 3: But I think studying marmots makes you think about a
Speaker 3: number of things, And one of those things is the
Speaker 3: sort of relativistic nature of how we study things.
Speaker 2: They get makeovers internally every year, right, they kind of
Speaker 2: they're reborn, and then they go back into I feel
Speaker 2: like there's Buddhism in that too.
Speaker 3: Right, you know, there's Buddhism everywhere. To start looking for it.
Speaker 1: Like if you've been feeling awfulately. One of the Buddhist
Speaker 1: for noble truths is what's called duca, which stems from
Speaker 1: a root, meaning a loose axle on a cart or
Speaker 1: having a bumpy ride, and duca means pain or suffering
Speaker 1: or just general unise. Maybe seeking something that won't last,
Speaker 1: like a dopamine hit. We all know about that. Some
Speaker 1: say that loneliness is a form of duca, and in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three, US Health and Human Services issued a
Speaker 1: report titled are Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, and it
Speaker 1: noted that loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling.
Speaker 1: It harms both individual and societal health. It's associated with
Speaker 1: a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety,
Speaker 1: and premature death. It continues, the mortality impact of being
Speaker 1: socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up
Speaker 1: to fifteen cigarettes a day, and even greater, and not
Speaker 1: associated with physical inactivity. So for human organisms such as yourself,
Speaker 1: Dan says.
Speaker 3: Not being super social is about as costly for your
Speaker 3: longevity as smoking. So we study the socially plastic species
Speaker 3: Yellow Belied Morments. Turns out that many ways we're looking
Speaker 3: at sociality. The more social animals are, the less likely
Speaker 3: they are to survive. The shorter they live, the less
Speaker 3: reproductive success they have, particularly for females. So there are
Speaker 3: some benefits of sociality, but we're also finding lots of
Speaker 3: costs of being too socially integrated with others. Is that
Speaker 3: what's that? Do? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Like, if you are too socially integrated, does it? What
Speaker 2: risks are there?
Speaker 3: Well, you're less likely to survive the winter, you're more
Speaker 3: likely to die over hibernation, maybe because if everyone is
Speaker 3: having a good time over the summer, they interfere with
Speaker 3: each other's hibernation over the winter. And maybe we don't know.
Speaker 3: We want to put instruments in them and understand that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: haven't many able to get funded for that. That if
Speaker 3: you're social and you stick around and don't disperse, you're
Speaker 3: likely to be reproductively suppressed. That nice girls finish last
Speaker 3: if you're a marmot, and that as you get older,
Speaker 3: you get crotchetier and you get more successful. So that's
Speaker 3: don't follow that in life either. Don't be a marmot.
Speaker 2: Okay, how about their love lives?
Speaker 1: Ashton McCall, Madeline Fox, Savannah Stark, Mark Rubin, Josie Olsen.
Speaker 1: They want to know, Josie says, do groundhogs mate for life?
Speaker 1: How many groundhog babies do groundhogs have in one litter?
Speaker 1: And you said they were called pups? Is that correct?
Speaker 3: Pups?
Speaker 1: But yeah, Madeline Fox wants to know. Are they good parents?
Speaker 1: I'm sure good is relative? Do they eat their baby?
Speaker 3: So everything I say you should not bring into your
Speaker 3: own life. But at the end of the day, marmots
Speaker 3: do everything, and different species do different things, So I'm
Speaker 3: not going to talk about groundhogs per se. I'm going
Speaker 3: to talk about some of the variation we see in marmots.
Speaker 3: So groundhogs mate probably with one male, maybe two might
Speaker 3: be trying to defend them. But females more or less
Speaker 3: live alone, and they probably have one male defending them.
Speaker 3: And maybe they mate with a couple, but that's because
Speaker 3: the males aren't successfully defending the females. They don't have
Speaker 3: a lot of paternal care, but there is muternal care
Speaker 3: for sure. In some cases, fathers might stick around and
Speaker 3: help a little more, but who knows. However, the yellow
Speaker 3: bellied marmots, which are these facultatively intermediately social, socially plastic species,
Speaker 3: kind of do everything. Sometimes in small habitat patches, we
Speaker 3: have one female with one male and they live in
Speaker 3: a monogamous life. In some cases, the females there and
Speaker 3: the males galvanting around and visits her and whatever. In
Speaker 3: some cases the male hibernates with the babies and the wife,
Speaker 3: in other cases they don't. In some cases the moms
Speaker 3: die and the kids can make it through alone. When
Speaker 3: we look at the female's perspective. Often successful big groups
Speaker 3: are big because females recruit more young to hang out
Speaker 3: with them. What does that mean? They let their daughters
Speaker 3: stick around, their sons pretty much all disperse and some
Speaker 3: of the male stick around. So then you have these
Speaker 3: multi female matra lines, a matrilineal social organization, mother and
Speaker 3: her offspring. And in those cases we see all sorts
Speaker 3: of interesting things. Sometimes we see co nursing. Sometimes we
Speaker 3: have lots of tension. We have mothers varying quite a
Speaker 3: bit in how quote good they are. Some ignore their kids,
Speaker 3: others are very attentive to their kids. Being attentive to
Speaker 3: your kids doesn't really help if you're living around a fox.
Speaker 3: The fox will kill all your kids. Is reproductive suppression,
Speaker 3: whereas mothers are preventing younger daughters from reproducing. So a
Speaker 3: lot of the things we're studying in the Yellow Bellied
Speaker 3: barments are that sociality isn't necessarily good, but they're sort
Speaker 3: of forced into it. In terms of mating, sometimes there
Speaker 3: are multi male groups, and in multi male groups, pretty
Speaker 3: much everything happens. We have one male defending all of
Speaker 3: the females and meeting with all of them. We have
Speaker 3: one male defending subsets, males defending subsets of females and
Speaker 3: meeting with them. And then we have mixed paternity.
Speaker 2: What is mixed paternity exactly?
Speaker 1: So it's one litter that contains kind of a grit,
Speaker 1: a bag full of siblings and half siblings. And if
Speaker 1: you would allow me to read from the Journal of
Speaker 1: Mammalogy paper Mating system and Paternity in Woodchucks, which says
Speaker 1: that animals seek copulations out of sight not only of
Speaker 1: their social mates, but also of scientific observers. And it
Speaker 1: continues that multiple paternity occurred in sixty three percent of litters,
Speaker 1: and overall, woodchucks in this natural population could be classified
Speaker 1: as quote genetically promiscuous. And if you're wondering how researchers
Speaker 1: keep track of who is who and all of these
Speaker 1: love triangles like watching this season premiere of a dating show.
Speaker 1: So the methodology section of the paper notes that quote,
Speaker 1: we used a small artist brush and commercial hair dye
Speaker 1: claial balsam color to apply a unique mark to each
Speaker 1: animal's hindquarters. And I also looked it up in the
Speaker 1: shade of balsam is like a medium ash brown, offering
Speaker 1: superior gray coverage and they have to use that because
Speaker 1: there's no commercial dye that is just from.
Speaker 3: Our Mixed paternity is not uncommon in mammals, so we
Speaker 3: can have that in yellow bellies. The other thing that
Speaker 3: the most successful males males typically have a ten year
Speaker 3: of about two years the most successful male. So the
Speaker 3: whole idea called reproductive skew, and reproductive skew is you
Speaker 3: know who's getting it, And in females there's not a
Speaker 3: lot of skew. I mean, there is a little bit,
Speaker 3: but I mean if you're alive and a breeder, you're
Speaker 3: getting it. But males it's a lot more difficult to
Speaker 3: get it. And if you think about elephant seals for example,
Speaker 3: you know, like one male elephant seal has all these
Speaker 3: females on the beach and you know, fights them to
Speaker 3: death and has all the reproductive success. Right, So the
Speaker 3: most successful males have had hundreds of babies because they
Speaker 3: live more than two years and they start screwing their kids.
Speaker 3: Oh no, don't try that at home.
Speaker 2: So then does that lead to a lot of birth?
Speaker 3: There is in breeding that we can detect and it's
Speaker 3: not good for them. But from a female's perspective, if
Speaker 3: there's only one male around, she has no choice.
Speaker 2: Better to do a Greek tragedy of some sort.
Speaker 3: Most of them make it, some don't, So something's better
Speaker 3: than nothing in the game of fitness. My favorite couple
Speaker 3: mid Blood. I think he lived to eleven, and he
Speaker 3: was this old, gray, grizzled guy. I watched him emerge
Speaker 3: one April. We had a blizzard and that was his
Speaker 3: last year. I never saw him after the blizzard, and
Speaker 3: he was stiff and whatever. But for a number of
Speaker 3: years and he was one of the most successful males
Speaker 3: we've ever had. And he used to have a whole
Speaker 3: section of the valley, and by the end of his
Speaker 3: life he had thirteen ninety nine. This grumpy female and
Speaker 3: his daughter. He was a sweetheart. Some males are just
Speaker 3: like rough and whatever. He would go up and greet
Speaker 3: her and she would smack him in the face, and
Speaker 3: you know, then he would like go and chase his
Speaker 3: daughter because he could. But you know, it's just so
Speaker 3: Greek tragedy. I don't know tragedy absolutely from his perspective.
Speaker 2: Let's keep talking, crotches. Tell me one wait, anal genital instinct, genitals, Okay,
Speaker 2: tell me about that.
Speaker 3: So one of the more interesting studies I've done that
Speaker 3: really woke up me to the consequences of modern pollution
Speaker 3: and particularly plastic pollution, is a marmot story. So it
Speaker 3: turns out that if you're a mammal, you know you're
Speaker 3: If you're a male, you have a penis and an anis,
Speaker 3: and those are a distance away. If you're a female,
Speaker 3: you have vagina and anis, and those are closer to
Speaker 3: each other. So people, maybe people like me, measure something
Speaker 3: called anogenital distance. Now, it also turns out that if
Speaker 3: you're a rodent, you have lots of siblings, and you
Speaker 3: can imagine all the babies all in the uterus to
Speaker 3: uteri like a pee, and then the pea pods are
Speaker 3: the babies growing up. And a guy named Frederick wm
Speaker 3: Saal was looking at the development the effect of hormones
Speaker 3: on development and with mice. Mice did little caesarean sections
Speaker 3: and figured out where the babies came from in their
Speaker 3: uterine horn in their uterus, and females surrounded by two
Speaker 3: males became more masculinized. So it also turns out if
Speaker 3: you're a mammal, you start off feminized and have to
Speaker 3: be defeminized, and you get defeminized by having little bursts
Speaker 3: of testosterone when you're in utero that begin sexual differentiation.
Speaker 3: So he found that natural variation in the location you
Speaker 3: were in that peapod influenced what you were exposed to
Speaker 3: your siblings around you. The testosterone leaked through and females
Speaker 3: became more masculinized, the distance between their vagina and their
Speaker 3: anus increased. I mean, you can try this at home
Speaker 3: and measure people if you want. But you know Grundle studies,
Speaker 3: so we didn't know. We are not doing cesareans on
Speaker 3: these marments. We study them in the wild. But a
Speaker 3: former post doc, Roquel Monklas, said, well, you're measuring it
Speaker 3: in general. Just go yeah, Like I want to sort
Speaker 3: of start analyzing this data set. I'm like yes. And
Speaker 3: what we discovered is that we could look at emergence
Speaker 3: sex ratio. So we don't know marmots are born, they
Speaker 3: probably live about twenty eight days in the borough and
Speaker 3: are nursing, and then they emerge after about twenty eight
Speaker 3: thirty days and they're more or less weaned. And we
Speaker 3: don't know who died in the borough, and we don't
Speaker 3: know who was absorbed and reabsorbed. So the Russians who've
Speaker 3: studied all these you know, marmots, have found all sorts
Speaker 3: of really interesting reabsorption of embryos. So there's all sorts
Speaker 3: of maternal control over what's going on.
Speaker 1: So, yes, mammal embryonic anatomy starts out female and then
Speaker 1: it d females, and many female mammals have more reproductive
Speaker 1: options than humans in some countries.
Speaker 3: Any event, we catched pups as soon as they emerge,
Speaker 3: so we can say, you know, of six babies, five
Speaker 3: were males and one was a female, so that is
Speaker 3: a male biased litter. Or four were females and two
Speaker 3: were males, that is a female biased litter. So it
Speaker 3: turns out that females in male biased litters are more androgenized,
Speaker 3: they have a greater antigenital distance, they engage in more
Speaker 3: sort of rough play and male like baby behavior pup behavior.
Speaker 3: They are more likely to disperse, But if they don't disperse,
Speaker 3: they're less likely to breed as two year olds. So
Speaker 3: here is natural variation in hormones. We had some people
Speaker 3: from Berkeley, some toxicology lab who used to work at
Speaker 3: Rumble and said, oh yeah, send me some Mormot bloods.
Speaker 3: They send us mormint blood. They said, we can find
Speaker 3: no evidence of chemical pollutants in this blood. This is
Speaker 3: cleaner than polar bears or anything else we've studied in nature.
Speaker 3: We never published that, but Marmot blood should be the
Speaker 3: new standard for non polluted blood. They're living in nature.
Speaker 3: So pause a moment and ask yourself a question. Plastic pollution.
Speaker 3: We're all ingesting plastics. Our sperm counts are going down.
Speaker 3: You know, we're having all sorts of enecological issues. Pollates
Speaker 3: which are found to make plastic saw turns out our
Speaker 3: testosterone mimicers. They mimic testosterone, the other plastic chemicals mimic estrogen.
Speaker 3: We are so screwing up the environment. And if we
Speaker 3: see in a natural population that is not polluted, and
Speaker 3: we see natural variation having such profound effects on later behavior, survival,
Speaker 3: et cetera, reproductive success, you should be scared about what
Speaker 3: we're putting in the environment. And you know what this
Speaker 3: is doing for this follow your inner marmot. Marmots are
Speaker 3: sentinels of our health, and so.
Speaker 1: The downstream effects could affect populations for eternity essentially, right,
Speaker 1: like if you have a if you have a populations
Speaker 1: that continue to be influenced hormonally.
Speaker 3: Let's say I would worry about humans, I wouldn't worry
Speaker 3: about marmots.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how is their blood so clean?
Speaker 3: I don't know. They were looking for a bunch of
Speaker 3: toxins that are usually screened for, you know, chemical toxins,
Speaker 3: and oh man.
Speaker 2: God, I feel like I'm half plastic in there. I know,
Speaker 2: I have no idea. Every time I read a new thing,
Speaker 2: I oh, well.
Speaker 3: You know you shouldn't read so much. It's a really
Speaker 3: scary world out there.
Speaker 1: So hormonal factors can impact behavioral changes and preferences. And
Speaker 1: we have an excellent neuro endochronology episode all about that
Speaker 1: will link for you. And keep in mind in these
Speaker 1: cases with marmots, this is with some of the cleanest
Speaker 1: plastic free blood scientists have come across. So given the
Speaker 1: known endocrine disruption caused by environmental toxins, you can see
Speaker 1: our environmental toxicology episode. It's anyone's guess how animals in
Speaker 1: ecology will change more rapidly as pollution continues. And I'm
Speaker 1: also going to link a New York Times story published
Speaker 1: today January thirteenth, twenty twenty six, whose headline reads EPA
Speaker 1: to stop considering lives saved when setting rules on air pollution.
Speaker 1: In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the
Speaker 1: cost to industry when setting pollution limit and not on
Speaker 1: the monetary value of saving human lives. Documents show so
Speaker 1: no matter how shrill we scream, hungry predators are out,
Speaker 1: there is a lot of the action and the drama
Speaker 1: happening underground or above ground. Like when you're trying to
Speaker 1: observe this, do you have camera traps and then you
Speaker 1: go from that, Like how.
Speaker 3: We spend in an ordinate amount of time sitting looking
Speaker 3: for things, and we spend a lot of time just
Speaker 3: sitting and watching animals. We spend over a thousand hours
Speaker 3: a year just trying to look at what's going on
Speaker 3: above ground. In the spring, we can see things as
Speaker 3: the vegetation starts growing. It's harder to see things in
Speaker 3: the subalpine area we work in Colorado. In Pakistan, it
Speaker 3: was phenomenal, Like could sit on a ridge top and
Speaker 3: see like eight social groups in this meadow because there's
Speaker 3: like no vegetation. It was the most amazing place to
Speaker 3: watch mormots and aside from being hypoxic all the time.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, you need oxygen and SPF
Speaker 1: for that, a lot of SPF.
Speaker 2: Yeah, do you have an SPF that you recommend the.
Speaker 3: More of the merrier and use physical blockage.
Speaker 2: Okay, so like you're you're working with the hats, you're
Speaker 2: working with.
Speaker 3: You know, I used to surf a lot, and I'm
Speaker 3: an alpine biologist and I've been eurotic about the sun
Speaker 3: and I cover myself and now I'm just getting things
Speaker 3: carved off me, right.
Speaker 1: I know it's that I'm at that age too where
Speaker 1: I'm like, they're gonna have to start getting a melon
Speaker 1: baller out. You can also see our Melanology episode for
Speaker 1: more on sun exposure and how and why your body
Speaker 1: makes pigments. Okay, mel Sarah Magnat, Kawasaka, Spencer hoyd Away,
Speaker 1: Protect trans Lives, Andrew Maurice Wuirld Tree riguero A, guy
Speaker 1: called Shane Mish the Fish, Abigail Bartel, first time question asker,
Speaker 1: Natalie Jy. I'm I'm trying to read these as fast
Speaker 1: as I can. Michael Crosa, Steve Hansen, Matt Thompson, Madeline Fox,
Speaker 1: and Michelle garth.
Speaker 2: How much wood could it? Wood?
Speaker 3: Chuck? Chuck?
Speaker 2: The woodchuck could chuck? Would do they chuck wood?
Speaker 3: I have to I don't even know what chucking wood is.
Speaker 2: Okay, thanks because neither of I said that.
Speaker 3: Ken Armitage, who started this mormut project that I inherited,
Speaker 3: wrote a book on marmots and was looking into sort
Speaker 3: of Northeastern indigenous culture, and it was possible that woodchucks
Speaker 3: were called wooshiks by some particular group of people. So
Speaker 3: woodchuck came from wushik.
Speaker 1: Oh, Okay, and that North American indigenous word is in
Speaker 1: the Cre dialect about gonquin. But groundhogs have this truly
Speaker 1: impressive number of nicknames, which I choose to believe means
Speaker 1: they're beloved. I feel like the more nicknames you have
Speaker 1: for someone, the more they live in your head. So
Speaker 1: feel free to call them woodchucks, ground pigs, rock chuck,
Speaker 1: rock chuck, weensuck, weienusk, land beaver, red monk, whistlepig, thick wood, badger, monas, moonach, Canada, marmot,
Speaker 1: or earth howk. You can also call the juveniles chucklings,
Speaker 1: and a mob of groundhogs is a coterie or a repetition. Now,
Speaker 1: other things you can say, of course, are how much
Speaker 1: wood wood, wood chuck, chuck of a woodchuck?
Speaker 2: Could chuck wood? Wood? Chucking wood? I always figured it
Speaker 2: meant do you know what chucking wood is?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: I figured it meant like wood shipping. But now I'm
Speaker 2: they're not beavers, I know. But then I'm wondering, do
Speaker 2: they are they chucking? Like throwing it? Maybe I don't. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you think it's throwing it. They don't throw wood, okay,
Speaker 2: So then the zero is if they could chuck though.
Speaker 3: Well, I would like to chuck a lot of wood
Speaker 3: if I could.
Speaker 2: I mean, I wonder if that would help to check
Speaker 2: a good amount until I tear a rotator couff sometimes,
Speaker 2: you know, I feel like it would be very cathartic.
Speaker 2: But I'm going to look into that and see if
Speaker 2: anyone has defined that.
Speaker 3: But beams are the lumberjacks.
Speaker 1: Of mature, all right, put the calculators away, nerds. Somebody
Speaker 1: already crunched the numbers for us. So in nineteen eighty eight,
Speaker 1: Richard Thomas, a wildlife bollogist from upstate New York, figured
Speaker 1: this out. So, first off, no whistle pigs are tossing
Speaker 1: wood around, okay, but they are little excavating machines, and
Speaker 1: if they woke up on the right side of the
Speaker 1: bed had a big seven eleven coffee, they can toss
Speaker 1: up to thirty five cubic feet or like ten cubic
Speaker 1: meters of dirt in a day, which weighs in at
Speaker 1: around seven hundred pounds or three hundred and twenty kilograms
Speaker 1: in a day seven hundred pounds. So do not waste
Speaker 1: natural resources by riddling chatchypt with this one. Also, legend
Speaker 1: has it if you were to ask Siri, she would say, well,
Speaker 1: since a woodchuck is really a groundhog, the correct question
Speaker 1: would be how many pounds in a groundhog's mound? When
Speaker 1: a groundhog pounds hog mounds, which is seven hundred pounds
Speaker 1: more wood than you can shake a stick up.
Speaker 2: Alexis Cully Margo Hayes both want to know.
Speaker 1: Margo says, why won't my dog stop trying to run
Speaker 1: down every single groundhog? She sees, I know you don't
Speaker 1: know this dog personally, but dogs in general?
Speaker 2: What's going on there?
Speaker 3: Doesn't everyone like to chase a squirrel?
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess a lot of people it's wired
Speaker 1: in our brain to notice things and run after them.
Speaker 3: So we have two corgi's. My wife's into agility, and
Speaker 3: the older corgi is pretty well trained in certain ways.
Speaker 3: But you know, he's like marmot, so he's like marmot. Oh, Marmott,
Speaker 3: I'll go find the marmot. So he chases the marmots.
Speaker 3: The marmots of course get back to the bros because
Speaker 3: he's a Corgi. Yeah, he doesn't hurt.
Speaker 2: The marmots, is I think, as long as there's not
Speaker 2: taking a chomp. And we did a porcupine episode and
Speaker 2: our editor who lives in Canada said that they had
Speaker 2: a dog who was not very bright and went after
Speaker 2: the same dead porcupine in the woods twice and got
Speaker 2: quilled twice.
Speaker 3: So we had marmots living under a cat. Porcupines, by
Speaker 3: the way, the populations are down pretty much throughout North America,
Speaker 3: which is really weird. And we used to have a lot
Speaker 3: of porcupines where I live. They eat. My dad in
Speaker 3: Colorado was pretty upset about that. Yeah, But at times
Speaker 3: we've had porcupines and marmots living under a cabin together,
Speaker 3: and at times I've had to take porcupine quills out
Speaker 3: of marmot faces.
Speaker 2: Like they just figure like I'm going to crash here,
Speaker 2: You're going to crash here. I love porcupines, I do
Speaker 2: love them, and I love watching them eat, And yes
Speaker 2: we have a porcupine episode, and yes we include audio
Speaker 2: of them squeaky munching on items such as sweet potatoes
Speaker 2: and pumpkins and corn and speaking of your corkis Marta
Speaker 2: Wells wants to know? And so does the goblin prints.
Speaker 2: Marta asks, why aren't they pets like cats? Would they
Speaker 2: make good pets? Or do they pee on themselves a lot?
Speaker 2: And you have to feed them a lot of tubers?
Speaker 3: I mean I peel on myself a lot, you know.
Speaker 3: So I mean, you know I walked.
Speaker 2: In here with Dallas pans.
Speaker 3: That shouldn't be a criteria for having a pet. So
Speaker 3: the social ones make good pets. And a lot of people,
Speaker 3: a lot of people. There are Instagram feeds of people
Speaker 3: with house marmots, but researchers and colleagues of mine in Russia,
Speaker 3: many of them have had house marmots. And the social
Speaker 3: ones are super sweet, and you know, it can be
Speaker 3: trained and they can be taken care of a woman
Speaker 3: used to send me pictures and write me and call
Speaker 3: me sometimes from Utah in the mountains and had a marmot.
Speaker 3: But then and she send me all these pictures. I
Speaker 3: think I have one around the corner of them eating
Speaker 3: laced potato chips and it's completely obese. It didn't hibernate.
Speaker 3: But then in the spring it disappeared and she calls
Speaker 3: me in tears one day and she's like, she left
Speaker 3: you know, why would she leave me? I'm like, well,
Speaker 3: maybe it was a coyote, or maybe she dispersed, because
Speaker 3: that's what they do, moments dispersed. Many of them disperse.
Speaker 3: But why would she leave me? It's very sad.
Speaker 2: I love her. If you have a pet marmot, do
Speaker 2: you have to let them hibernate like you know how
Speaker 2: people bury their turtles in the winter. Do you have
Speaker 2: to give them like a freezer?
Speaker 3: Uh No, you don't have to. And the people that
Speaker 3: have pets typically don't. They just let them get fat
Speaker 3: and feed them and maybe they sleep a little more.
Speaker 3: And I don't know pet them. And there's some Russians
Speaker 3: that have these amazing instagram of their marmots, and.
Speaker 2: I've bet their wildlife rehabbers that do that too, right,
Speaker 2: taking an unreleasable market.
Speaker 3: In North America, it is illegal to have wild animals
Speaker 3: as pets.
Speaker 1: Just a disclaimer, So yes, if you want to have
Speaker 1: a woodchuck roommate, only certified wildlife rehabbers need apply. Same
Speaker 1: with possums and squirrels and raccoons, and yes we have
Speaker 1: an episode for each of those critters. Also, as I
Speaker 1: edited this episode, in my home that would be substandard
Speaker 1: for a groundhog. I had a fuzzy lump of woodchuck sized,
Speaker 1: potty trained doggie snoring on my lap. So just like
Speaker 1: get a dog or a cat, just get one of
Speaker 1: those instead. And for more on those, we have a
Speaker 1: recent episode on Ethnosinology all about how dogs evolved from wolves.
Speaker 1: And of course we have a Pelinology episode and that
Speaker 1: covers why your cats deserve a second litter box and
Speaker 1: a heated blanket.
Speaker 2: Our best buds, They're worth the trouble. What about from
Speaker 2: I Guess Pets to pest Adeline Burg, Elizabeth Sheeley, Ricky
Speaker 2: g Trishacy, Laura MacLean. When Vivian, Alex Hurtman and Brienna
Speaker 2: l want to.
Speaker 1: Know, Alex said tips to keep them away from the garden.
Speaker 1: I have seen many a woodchuck raise a vegetable patch,
Speaker 1: which is fair for them, but sad for my salad.
Speaker 1: What do you do if you have a lot of
Speaker 1: backyard garden wood chucks?
Speaker 2: What do you do?
Speaker 3: Wouldn't you want to feed them? Wouldn't you want to
Speaker 3: sort of, you know, share your garden with the wildlife.
Speaker 3: Isn't this a teachable moment where you can aren't you
Speaker 3: blessed to have an animal that you can sort of
Speaker 3: look at up close and personal? Y? I?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes you could mountain lion poop. Mountain lion poop? Okay?
Speaker 3: Hey pee?
Speaker 2: What about? Can you put stuff in cages? Can you
Speaker 2: grow your food in an upground? You know what I mean?
Speaker 3: Years ago, so this was in the former Soviet Union
Speaker 3: and they were in Coazaks Center or something, and there
Speaker 3: was a nuclear facility they were trying to marmot proof,
Speaker 3: and it's like how deep does a fence have to
Speaker 3: go in order to and how high does it have
Speaker 3: to go? I'm like, I don't know. They can dig
Speaker 3: deep if they want, but it sort of depends. And
Speaker 3: we've talked about that for a while. Then at one
Speaker 3: of these Marmot meetings in Switzerland. We're at a place
Speaker 3: called Marmot Paradise. It's above Montreaux and you take the
Speaker 3: train up and these people ski in the winter there,
Speaker 3: and the train makes money in the winter, and they
Speaker 3: wanted to make money in the summer, so they sort
Speaker 3: of got marmots from all over the place. But I'm
Speaker 3: there at this conference and my colleague and friend from
Speaker 3: colorado's there and he's kept Greg Floran, he's kept marmots before,
Speaker 3: and he's looking at the fence and he knows snow
Speaker 3: and he's like, these marmots are going to emerge through
Speaker 3: a couple of meters of snow in the spring, and
Speaker 3: that fence isn't tall enough. Oh no, So we don't
Speaker 3: know if they lost the marmots.
Speaker 2: It's like Jurassic Park, but with marmots kind of.
Speaker 3: But I don't think Marmot's not veloci.
Speaker 2: Raptors, right.
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to follow up on this, but I
Speaker 1: need to let you know that this alpine destination, yes
Speaker 1: it's called Marmott Paradise, does not have the highest reviews.
Speaker 1: Let us read from the book of trip Advisor. One star,
Speaker 1: more like a high security prison than a paradise chain
Speaker 1: link fences topped with barbed wire. Poor marmots. If you
Speaker 1: are looking forward to the Marmots, you will be disappointed.
Speaker 1: Another review, written in French, was titled scand'lous, meaning outrageous
Speaker 1: or disgraceful, and the review translated to read, there is
Speaker 1: only one Marmot left next to the restaurant, which seems
Speaker 1: to be bored and waiting for deliverance from death. Others
Speaker 1: wrote average for humans, hell for marmots, paradise for no one,
Speaker 1: absolutely horrendous, unworthy of anyone's life, and a final review
Speaker 1: led with smelly. The website reports thankfully Marmot's Paradise has
Speaker 1: been permanently closed. I didn't see any reviews from the
Speaker 1: last few years, so I'm hoping all the critters are
Speaker 1: set free now for actual, wild, happy marmots. I understand
Speaker 1: that Washington's Mount Rainier is a prime destination. One social
Speaker 1: media post I saw explained that at Mount Rainier, I
Speaker 1: heard the sound of a little girl screaming. I ran
Speaker 1: to say the little girl it was a marmot. Of course,
Speaker 1: they write, but don't terrorize them. Just keep a distance,
Speaker 1: use a long lens. Don't give them any reason to
Speaker 1: shriek in your presence. Let's keep it chill. But okay,
Speaker 1: speaking of teeth, I was thinking, like, we have gopher
Speaker 1: cages over some of our native plants because we're like
Speaker 1: we would sometimes see patches of poppies getting just like
Speaker 1: a bouquet snatched out of ground. So we're a constant
Speaker 1: war with our gophers. I'm curious you mentioned that.
Speaker 2: They can choo through stainless steel, which is absolutely insane
Speaker 2: to me.
Speaker 3: But like you choose through their welds, break the cages.
Speaker 3: That's crazy.
Speaker 2: Can you if you had like a garden bed that
Speaker 2: had that kind of like mesh, you know, galvanized whatever,
Speaker 2: could they break that into that?
Speaker 3: So behavior, and I'm really interested in human wildlife interactions
Speaker 3: and what we perceive as conflicts. And you know, if
Speaker 3: you can redefine what a conflict is, that's the best thing.
Speaker 3: If you really want to grow vegetables there, you're going
Speaker 3: to declare war. And you know they're the general thing
Speaker 3: is you make it harder for them to get to something,
Speaker 3: and you make it easy there for them to get
Speaker 3: to others. So maybe you have some sacrificial you know,
Speaker 3: tulips or tubers for them. They don't need tubers, but
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, whatever for them to eat, and
Speaker 3: that might be good. And then you protect other stuff
Speaker 3: with fencing, and you can fence them out the same
Speaker 3: way you can fence der.
Speaker 2: L Okay, Well, you mentioned they don't eat tubers.
Speaker 3: Maybe they eat tubers, but maybe they do.
Speaker 1: But in general Victoria's shape in metaline fox. Sarah vander Kleid,
Speaker 1: Sarah E. G.
Speaker 2: And Shannon Germany want to know, Yeah, what kind of
Speaker 2: things do they eat? Shann wan to know do they
Speaker 2: eat bird eggs like grassland bird eggs.
Speaker 3: They typically don't eat bird eggs. So some squirrels are
Speaker 3: much more omnivorous than marmots. So the marmots that I've
Speaker 3: looked at and read about, they're pretty much vegetarians, you know,
Speaker 3: the plants. They might eat some insects. You see insects
Speaker 3: in their poop, but that's probably incidental or you know,
Speaker 3: there isn't fantaside in some species. So when I say
Speaker 3: don't try this at home, don't do this at home either.
Speaker 3: I mean these more social species, the most social species,
Speaker 3: there's bad stuff that happens. So males will come in
Speaker 3: and kill all the babies. Yeah, and then you know,
Speaker 3: chase away the male and then try to be the
Speaker 3: male for the next year, kind of like lions. Females
Speaker 3: sometimes engage in fantaside as well. It's a little less common,
Speaker 3: but there isn't obviously cannibalism associated with the in fantaside.
Speaker 3: It really seems to be reproductive competition in the males.
Speaker 3: Female is not so sure. But the golden marmots I
Speaker 3: studied in Pakistan and fantaside was as important as predation
Speaker 3: for first summer mortality. Wow, got twenty five percent of
Speaker 3: the kids were killed by other marmots and about twenty
Speaker 3: five percent were probably killed by predators.
Speaker 2: You know, people are fascinated by true crime, and I
Speaker 2: feel like it's got nothing on marmots.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, we mormits are soap op.
Speaker 1: They're really like Dateline should just take up marmots if
Speaker 1: they really want to bring the drama. But what about
Speaker 1: Chelley Bean redhead? Scientists and Colby Evans want to know
Speaker 1: what prompts a groundhog to start digging? And how are
Speaker 1: they digging these tunnels and burrows? Are they ever popping
Speaker 1: into abandoned ones when it comes to home building, what
Speaker 1: tools do they have growing out of their bodies?
Speaker 3: So, since we're talking about zen type statements, yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: my insight after a lot of study, was marmots are
Speaker 3: where they've been. Okay, just focus on that, find your
Speaker 3: inner eye. You know, marmots are where they have been.
Speaker 3: There are good areas and bad areas, and there's intergenerational
Speaker 3: transfer of these burrows. So you know, on average, animals
Speaker 3: live about three and a half years four and a
Speaker 3: half years, they die and other ones did their descendants
Speaker 3: come in or sometimes new animals come in and take
Speaker 3: over the burrows when we've had huge population explosions. You
Speaker 3: see them dig new boroughs. These typically aren't good burrows.
Speaker 3: They probably get killed in them. The good play places
Speaker 3: where they're living are good places where they've lived before,
Speaker 3: so they dig, they renovate. You see them digging with
Speaker 3: their claws. You see them moving rocks out with their mouth.
Speaker 3: You see them making piles. You see them pushing piles,
Speaker 3: you know, with their nose. So they're well equipped. They're rodents.
Speaker 2: Do they have tails?
Speaker 3: Of course they have tails.
Speaker 2: What kind of tails do they have?
Speaker 3: Well, they're not as bushy as a ground as tree squirrels,
Speaker 3: but they have a bushy tail and they use their
Speaker 3: tail for communication. And the long tailed marmot, the golden marmots.
Speaker 3: I studied the subspecies of the long tailed marmots really
Speaker 3: use their tails a lot.
Speaker 2: What about groundhogs?
Speaker 3: Groundhogs have tails, they use their tails.
Speaker 1: This was a question from Ann Award, mel Justin Murphy,
Speaker 1: Strutwigic and at them foot. They want to know do
Speaker 1: groundhogs communicate with high pitched or low frequency tones or both?
Speaker 1: They say, I feel like I've heard them squeak, but
Speaker 1: underground it seems like low vibrations would work better. Stratwigic
Speaker 1: wanted to know, I'd like to hear the whistle of
Speaker 1: a whistle pig and why this usually solitary creature vocalizes.
Speaker 1: How are they communicating? Is it chirps and whistles?
Speaker 2: Is it tails?
Speaker 3: So in an incredible about of good luck, when I
Speaker 3: was just finishing my PhD and I was using alarm
Speaker 3: calls to scare marmots to understand how their attention was compromised,
Speaker 3: to understand the risks of being engaged in different behaviors.
Speaker 3: When you're playing, you're focusing on your play partner, not
Speaker 3: on predators. It's risky. Play is risky, so therefore you
Speaker 3: play next to your burrow. I said, I really want
Speaker 3: to study the evolution of alarm calling in marmots. People
Speaker 3: were saying, oh, well, referential communication is something you want
Speaker 3: to study word like communication, and I'm like, marmots are
Speaker 3: a great system to study the evolution of this, And
Speaker 3: I wrote a postdoc proposal and got funded to go
Speaker 3: around the world and continue studying marmot screams and whistles
Speaker 3: and chirps and whatever. So the first thing you should
Speaker 3: realize is don't believe anything you read, because I was
Speaker 3: unable to find any strong evidence that they have word
Speaker 3: like communication. They communicate risk a variety of different ways,
Speaker 3: which are super cool. Some call more, some call faster.
Speaker 3: But it's not as though they have one type of
Speaker 3: whistle or chirp for an aerial predator and one type
Speaker 3: for a terrestrial predator, as do verveant monkeys. Ververant monkeys
Speaker 3: are pretty cool, as do chickens, as do a lot
Speaker 3: of some species, not all. Some primates, not all primates
Speaker 3: have word like communication for different sorts of predators. They
Speaker 3: may label them, but they communicate a lot of different
Speaker 3: risk a lot of different ways. The Vancouver Island marmot
Speaker 3: almost one extinct, down to less than fifty in captivity,
Speaker 3: now up to about three hundred and something four hundred
Speaker 3: something in the wild. Major an ongoing conservation work trying
Speaker 3: to keep those guys alive, had five different alarm calls.
Speaker 3: And not only that, they probably had simple syntax in
Speaker 3: that when I did playbacks where I would vary the
Speaker 3: order of calls, they responded differently. No, so who knows,
Speaker 3: almost one extinct. We almost lost knowledge of language by
Speaker 3: losing the Vancouver Island mornment, which looks like a bear
Speaker 3: cub in this absolutely adorable.
Speaker 2: Was it habitat loss? Was it hunting? What? Did it?
Speaker 3: A combination of hyal pine logging, which so they only
Speaker 3: lived on Vancouver Island high pine logging seemingly brought them
Speaker 3: down suboptimal habitat and associated with the logging roads. Vancouver
Speaker 3: Island has a remarkably rich wolf and cougar population, and
Speaker 3: the cougars and wolves were eating them, and they would
Speaker 3: go along the logging trails eat them. So it was
Speaker 3: a bad scene.
Speaker 2: And their alarm calls did not save them from wolves
Speaker 2: or loggers.
Speaker 3: We have a paper on yellow bellied marmots that sort
Speaker 3: of suggests that those who call more die younger. So
Speaker 3: calling doesn't seem to be a good personal thing to do,
Speaker 3: but it may help others.
Speaker 2: Oh, loose lips sink ships.
Speaker 3: Loose lips sink ships.
Speaker 2: Oh man, what's a big myth about a marmot or
Speaker 2: a groundhog that you're so sick of having to bust?
Speaker 2: Or maybe you're thrilled to bust a myth about it?
Speaker 3: Did they chuck wood?
Speaker 2: That's top of the list, top of list.
Speaker 1: There's no woodchucking that happened even if they could. What
Speaker 1: about what's something that sucks about your job?
Speaker 3: I love my job. I have the best job in
Speaker 3: the world. So getting funding for it, I mean I'm
Speaker 3: getting fun. So I'm running this long term study. We've
Speaker 3: just finished our sixty fourth year. We're planning our sixty
Speaker 3: fifth year of studying this individually identified population of marmots
Speaker 3: in Colorado. They can't get funding. I was blessed by
Speaker 3: having eleven years of NSF support for this long term
Speaker 3: research stuff, and we were trying to get renewals, and
Speaker 3: the program officer said, we will never fund you. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And we're asking questions that no one else, very few
Speaker 3: people can ask that this project has been so productive.
Speaker 3: It's been so effective at educating people, in training people,
Speaker 3: and in coming up with biological and evolutionary insights that
Speaker 3: you don't get from, you know, short term studies.
Speaker 2: And we just can't get funded even when you're at
Speaker 2: a place like UCLA, like a top school.
Speaker 3: Well, well it shouldn't matter the school you're at it
Speaker 3: out of the science you're doing. I think we're doing
Speaker 3: good science. It's very, very frustrating, And then I don't
Speaker 3: know How'm going to keep this thing going. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: I feel really obligated to keep it going because my
Speaker 3: colleague and late friend Ken Armor's just part of this thing.
Speaker 3: It's the second longest study of individually marked mammals in
Speaker 3: the world. The Chimpanzees of the Gombie, which Jane Goodall started,
Speaker 3: was is quote the longest. These long term studies, of
Speaker 3: which there are many, are priceless. Many of them fail,
Speaker 3: many of them don't get passed on between generations, many
Speaker 3: of them die when the person retires. Yet the insights
Speaker 3: we get from these are profound, and they're really important.
Speaker 3: This is how we understand life around us. If we
Speaker 3: want to understand plasticity, if we want to understand how life,
Speaker 3: whether it's plant life or animal life, you know, is
Speaker 3: going to respond to a increasingly variable world. We need
Speaker 3: long term studies where we see different epics of selection,
Speaker 3: and marmots are one of these, really you know, good
Speaker 3: long term studies.
Speaker 2: It's interesting too that we you know, with this Groundhog's
Speaker 2: Day being such a holiday involving meteorology and climate and culture,
Speaker 2: that there's not something so obvious to most people that
Speaker 2: ecology and environment and climate are all very intertwined and
Speaker 2: they can tell us something about the other.
Speaker 3: You know, I'm clearly not effective at writing proposals for
Speaker 3: pure review. Good at writing papers, but proposals aren't working.
Speaker 2: We're going to start with fat Marmot week, Fat Marmot week,
Speaker 2: and that's the ferd, that's the entre into it. Get
Speaker 2: Some billionaires have a pet project, is I guess what
Speaker 2: we all that's our only hope is a soft hearted billionaire,
Speaker 2: which is we know it doesn't exist. But what about
Speaker 2: the thing you love the most? I mean, I know
Speaker 2: you love your job. So many people can't say that
Speaker 2: they've seen all of these places good at the top
Speaker 2: of Alpine summit.
Speaker 3: So I mean, basically, you have to follow your inner marmot.
Speaker 3: That's my advice. I follow my inner marmot regularly and
Speaker 3: it takes me good places and they experience and interesting
Speaker 3: things and meet interesting people like today. But you know,
Speaker 3: I love handling pups because them big marmots. We don't
Speaker 3: knock our animals out. We put them in handling bags
Speaker 3: and then we try to get blood from them. We
Speaker 3: try to get mouth swabs, and we try to put
Speaker 3: marks on them. We can study them and we don't
Speaker 3: hurt them, and that's a good thing. But the babies
Speaker 3: you can hold in a hand and if you're holding
Speaker 3: it right, you don't get bitten.
Speaker 2: How small are they?
Speaker 3: They fit in your hand like the sort of grip.
Speaker 2: Them like a baby rabbit kind of.
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, a little longer.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: We sometimes smaller.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. I want to see a pop I
Speaker 2: r l.
Speaker 3: Oh you do. So what you want to do is
Speaker 3: you want to do a field biology ologies and come
Speaker 3: to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and see a bunch
Speaker 3: of you know, science geeks at work.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I'm there. Oh, this has been so wonderful.
Speaker 2: I have from the start again whistle pigs, woodchucks, groundhogs.
Speaker 2: Didn't know the difference, and I feel like I am
Speaker 2: leaving here knowing what a barm it is and I
Speaker 2: love them.
Speaker 3: Marmots are cool.
Speaker 1: So ask groundhog people groundbreakingly not smart questions because they
Speaker 1: have dug up the research, they have the answers. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much to doctor Blumstein for being on hand
Speaker 1: to open your office to the curiosities of me and
Speaker 1: our listeners. Via patreon dot com slash ologies, you two
Speaker 1: can join first Lilosa Dollar months in stemate Questions. You
Speaker 1: can find out more about Dan and his lab at
Speaker 1: the link in the show notes. We'll also link to
Speaker 1: his charity of choice, as well as our website at
Speaker 1: aliwar dot com slash Ologies slash Marmatology, which we'll have
Speaker 1: so many links to studies and videos of groundhogs eating fruit.
Speaker 1: We're at ologies on blue Sky and Instagram. I'm at
Speaker 1: ali Ward on both. You can get merch via ologiesmerch
Speaker 1: dot com. We have shorter kids Save Classrooms save versions
Speaker 1: of ologies called smologies SMO L O g I E. S.
Speaker 1: You can subscribe to for free wherever you get podcasts.
Speaker 1: Aaron Talbert admins Theologies podcast Facebook group. Avelene Malick makes
Speaker 1: our professional transcripts.
Speaker 2: Kelly R.
Speaker 1: Dwyer does a website nudging me out of hibernation and
Speaker 1: into the studio as scheduling producer Noel Dilworth. Our top
Speaker 1: headed MC is managing director Susan Hale, and the audio
Speaker 1: experts putting my pig whistles together are Chake Chafee as
Speaker 1: director and lead editor, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, Nick
Speaker 1: thorburn squeaked us the theme music, and if you stick
Speaker 1: around to the very end of the show, I tell
Speaker 1: you a secret.
Speaker 2: I burden you with that.
Speaker 1: And this week, first off, the transcription software that we
Speaker 1: use cannot spell Marmots. It either corrected it to marmite
Speaker 1: or Mormons, which was particularly on savory when writing about
Speaker 1: the mating and the childcare habits of these creatures. But
Speaker 1: the other secret is that doctor Sarah McNulty of the
Speaker 1: Toothology Squid episode is in town and staying at our
Speaker 1: groundhog Den. And it's her birthday this coming Friday, January sixteenth.
Speaker 1: So if you were hearing this before then again Friday,
Speaker 1: January sixteenth, whish her a happy one on Instagram Blue
Speaker 1: sky You can also maybe throw five or ten bucks
Speaker 1: her way for her nonprofit Skype as Scientist, which is
Speaker 1: doing great work. One of the things I got her
Speaker 1: is a perfume that is based on the follttle organic
Speaker 1: compounds in squidding. So I'm excited to take awhiff. I think, Okay,
Speaker 1: gather your friends for Groundhog Day because it's midwinter. Isolation
Speaker 1: and phone addiction caused by billionaire media conglomerates are killing us.
Speaker 1: So put on mittens, eat some veggies, stare at each
Speaker 1: other's shadows. Instead, Southern hemisphere remembers subscrite okay, bryebye, pacodermatology,
Speaker 1: homology or doo zoology, lithology, new zeology, meteorology and old pedatology, ethnology, seriology, elinology.
Speaker 2: This is one time where television really fails to capture
Speaker 2: the true excitement of a large squirrel
Speaker 3: Predicting the weather.