Marmotology (GROUNDHOGS) with Daniel Blumstein

Tongue twisters. Frosty holidays. Scandals. Big ol’ rodent butts. Let’s talk groundhogs with UCLA conservationist, field biologist, professor and Marmotologist, Dr. Daniel Blumstein. We cover what broadly is a marmot, the Buddhism and paganism of the midwinter slump, marmot parenthood, what they are singing into the wind, how to co-exist with one in your garden, why they don't get stressed about holiday bingeing, the real estate layout of a groundhog lair, how and why we celebrate Groundhog Day, romantic advice you should not take from a marmot, what to do if you want a marmot as a pet, why their blood boggled science, and the wandering etymology behind their aliases. It’s an episode you’ll want to hear over and over. And over. And over. And over.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey, it's the lady next to you at the salad bar covering up her iceberg lettuce with spring greens, Ally Ward. And this is Ologies. This is big squirrels. We got marmots, we got groundhogs, we got facts, figures, tongue twisters, and scandals. But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show who make it possible. And you too can submit your questions before we record. And you can join Patreon for a dollar a month at patreon.com/ologies. Thank you to everyone out there in Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com. And for $0, you can support us just by leaving a review. And to prove that I read them all, here's one from the scheming rat who wrote, "This show is the best. Not an opinion. P.S. If you hate the swears and stuff, guess what? They write," in all caps, "She made another podcast just for you. Go to Smologies." Thank you, the scheming rat, for screaming that.

• 0:45Alie Ward?

  And yes, we have devised a classroom-safe version of Ologies. It's available in its own feed wherever you get podcasts. It's called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. Also, thank you to all the sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of the ologist choosing each week. This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas, so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products

• 1:29Alie Ward?

  are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. Ugh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries.

• 2:13Alie Ward?

  Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know you Verbo, terms apply. See verbo.com/Trust for details. Okay, so marmatology, the word marmot goes back to the Latin root, meaning mountain mouse. And this week, we have a true expert. They did their undergrad at the University of Colorado Boulder, and then went to UC Davis for a master's and a PhD in animal behavior.

• 2:57Alie Ward?

  They are now a researcher and a professor at UCLA's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. They've spent years and years and years studying the complex communication of marmots and integrating that into conservation efforts to influence environmental policy. And on a rainy January day here in LA a few weeks ago, I got over to the university to lob some questions. First, just got to UCLA, I'm here to interview the groundhog expert. I got out of my car and I spilled 20 ounces of cold iced tea onto my crotch. It's so soaked, like, it's not a little wet, it's soaked like I had hosed myself off.

• 3:39Alie Ward?

  This is what happens when you do an interview with a person, you really never know what you're gonna get.

• 3:44Alie Ward?

  Hey, I'm Ally.

• 3:47Alie Ward?

  You waiting for me? No. Sorry about my pants. All right.

• 3:50Alie Ward?

  We're already off to a memorable start, but clearly, our ologist and the lovely Holly Ober in UCLA Media Relations, they were chill, they were down to clown. We went up to his office, where he has all sorts of skulls and marmot art, even a road kill groundhog that he and his wife Janice taxidermied themselves. And we chatted all about the rodent du jour, including how and why we celebrate Groundhog's Day, the Buddhism and paganism of the midwinter slump, romantic advice you should not take from a marmot. What they are singing into the wind, how to coexist with one in your garden, why they don't get stressed about holiday binging, the real estate layout of a groundhog lair, what to do if you want to marmot as a pet, why their blood, boggled science,

• 4:34Alie Ward?

  and the wandering etymology behind their aliases with animal behaviorist, conservationist, field biologist, professor, and marmatologist Dr. Daniel Blumstein.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Dan Blumstein.

• 5:03Alie Ward?

  He him? Right, okay. Um, this is news to me as of about 15 minutes ago. A groundhog is a woodchuck?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  There are 15 species of marmots.

• 5:15Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Groundhogs are one of those species, and other name for groundhogs are woodchucks.

• 5:20Alie Ward?

  I had no idea. I thought they were different animals.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  We have a holiday named after them, and it's about behavior and climate and weather and what's not to love about woodchucks.

• 5:30Alie Ward?

  The fact that they are a Venn diagram that is just one circle is astounding me. What about whistlepig? What's up with that?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Whistlepig is a common name for some marmots.

• 5:40Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  People call yellow-bellied marmots whistlepigs, but in general, woodchucks are the least social of the 15 species of marmots.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Don't talk to me.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Babies emerge and then disperse in their first year of life.

• 5:51Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  They may settle around their mom, and my friend and colleague Chris Mayer at University of Maine is studying woodchuck behavior in detail, and has shown that there's a little more sociality than most people think about when they look at woodchucks. But the other species are more social. So I study yellow-bellied marmots, which are socially plastic. And what's really interesting about that is it allows us to understand the dynamics of, you know, what's good about being social. Not a lot of things for marmots. We can get into that.

• 6:17Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 6:18Speaker 02

  The rest of the species are much more social, and the kids stick around for a couple of years. And in some cases, there's mothers are mating with sons to keep them around and outfind marmots.

• 6:29Alie Ward?

  What?

• 6:29Speaker 02

  You know, you should not use marmots as a model for our behavior. There's all sorts of sordid stuff going down with marmots.

• 6:37Alie Ward?

  You really want to know? I do.

• 6:39Alie Ward?

  So a groundhog.

• 6:41Alie Ward?

  Is the type of marmot?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 6:42Alie Ward?

  Not all marmots are groundhogs.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 6:44Alie Ward?

  The cactus succulent.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 6:46Alie Ward?

  Right? What's the range of size? Because I picture a groundhog, I picture it like a beefy cat.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  They're all about cat size.

• 6:53Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  The Himalayan marmot, Marmota hemelaniana robusta.

• 6:57Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  I think the robusta, it's not like a beer or a coffee. It's because it's big. But most of them are sort of cat sized animals. But what's the size? I mean, they double their mass every year, right?

• 7:07Alie Ward?

  Every year they double?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  They hibernate. Marmots are the biggest of the true hibernators. Bears don't hibernate. Bears estivate. Bears can't lose enough body heat to properly hibernate.

• 7:18Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  So marmots lose their body heat. Not only that, we did a study where we borrowed animals from the wild, brought them back to the lab, hibernated them, put them back to the wild when we were done with them. And it turns out they actively suppress their metabolism and temperature, which is super interesting. Yellow bellied marmots are incredibly efficient hibernators. In big ones, uh, at the end of the year are about five kilos, which is pretty big. That's a big cat.

• 7:42Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Um, they burn, when they're in deep torpor, a gram of fat a day.

• 7:47Alie Ward?

  A gram of fat a day? So they gotta get chunk up before they hibernate?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, so basically biomedical researchers study marmots in part to understand how you can be obese without having health consequences.

• 7:58Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  So they don't get all the things that we get if we eat like a marmot.

• 8:02Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Actually, marmots are vegetarians, so maybe we should eat like marmots.

• 8:05Alie Ward?

  Is it a difference between white fat and brown fat?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Well, they have both. And my friend who did the research on this, Walter Arnold, formerly in Germany, had said, no, it got more complex than that. But I'll say the, the sort of dumbed down version that I can understand. And that is that if you're a hibernator, you have to put on two types of fat. You have to put on heating oil and you have to put on insulation.

• 8:25Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  So one of them is easier to burn during the winter for heating oil and the other provides that insulation. So what's really interesting is, you know, you might think it's easy to study what an animal eats.

• 8:39Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  It's actually really hard to study what an animal eats when you begin thinking about that these guys are looking for specific fatty acids. So they eat plants, but plants aren't plants aren't plants and different parts of the same plant have different fatty acid compositions. So what they're eating, the specific fatty acids they're eating in a particular ratios are important for putting on these different sorts of body fat.

• 9:02Alie Ward?

  And walk me back to what exactly is a marmot? Is it a rodent? Is it a? What is a marmot?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Well, I would say they're the king of rodents, but capybara are the kings of rodents.

• 9:13Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  I love capybara. But marmots are the kings of the ground squirrels.

• 9:17Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  So they're related to prairie dogs and ground squirrels, a little less related to tree squirrels. There are lots of species of ground squirrels around the northern hemisphere and some in the southern hemisphere. Prairie dogs are only in North America and marmots have a whole Arctic distribution. They're found around the northern hemisphere, but not in the southern hemisphere.

• 9:36Alie Ward?

  So heads up, a marmot in general, it's a big, huge ground squirrel that can weigh up to 15 pounds or seven kilograms. It can be up to two feet long and there's about 15 or so species. There are among those, there are little guys, but overall they live mostly in North America and Eurasia. They're a bit dachshund-like. They have cute little legs. They have a furry little tail. If you like charismatic rodents, also you can enjoy our scirogeology episode about squirrels and our capybara episode in which we discuss the Pope's decision to classify them as fish. And then what about groundhogs?

• 10:14Speaker 02

  Groundhogs have a really interesting distribution. I think they go down into Georgia and they sort of go swath across North America and end up in Fairbanks, Alaska.

• 10:23Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  So this asocial, grumpy marmot, and they're a little bigger than than other species because they they're not efficient hibernators. They lose weight really quickly, so they get really fat and they lose a lot of weight. And groundhog's really cute because they have really big ears. You look at them like, that's a groundhog.

• 10:38Alie Ward?

  And a groundhog is one of the larger, chunkier marmots with this bristly brownish fur. It's got a medium length tail. It looks kind of like a quokka having a bad day, just pissy. And Dan also studies yellow-bellied marmots, which are they are not known for their cowardice. I went down some marmot holes and the origin of that phrase is widely debated, but it may come from like an old timey imbalance of humors, meaning someone is jaundice, which is, which that's kind of mean. It's pretty cold. Speaking of.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Marmots curl up into balls. And when we hibernated marmots, it was super interesting. And why was it super interesting? Because we went in and we had a power outage. It's like, oh, we better weigh them. And we went into the hibernation room and pulled them out and they're wound up in a tight little ball and they feel like a fuzzy rock. They were cold, they were hard and stiff, and they were fuzzy. And I don't know if you've been to the Dead Sea, but it's sort of the same. This doesn't fit my view of physics.

• 11:39Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  The Dead Sea, you walk into the Dead Sea and you sit down and you're sitting in the water and floating. That doesn't fit any fit. Picking up a living furry stone is not in the physics that I've been taught.

• 11:53Alie Ward?

  How low does their body temperature get?

• 11:56Speaker 02

  So there are ground squirrels, Arctic ground squirrels, that can get their body temperature below zero Celsius, below thirty-two. They have antifreeze, pretty cool.

• 12:04Alie Ward?

  Is anyone studying groundhogs for like biomedical applications?

• 12:11Speaker 02

  People are doing nasty things to groundhogs to understand, you know, obesity and how you can be obese without having problems of obesity, because they get obese every year. They double their mass, they have to put on fat and and energy in order to not eat for seven or eight months. Marmots are kings of escape in captivity. So marmot meetings, you go and you hang out with all these people from all over the former Soviet Union or the Soviet Union at the time, depending upon when you went. And one guy, and they they were using him in Russia, Soviet Union, for bioweapons research.

• 12:44Alie Ward?

  Ow!

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Because they harbor some diseases, a lot of them have plague in in Europe.

• 12:48Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  But then they have other things as well. So this one guy was like, oh, yeah, my KGB colonel came to me one day and said, you know, if the marmots break out one more time, you will be fired, you know? So when we brought these into captivity to borrow them, to hibernate them, we put them in stainless steel welded rabbit cages.

• 13:09Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  And the first thing they did was break the stainless steel welds and break out. So now they're running around this environmental chamber room and we have to catch them. And they wouldn't hibernate. And my colleague, the late Ken Armitage, who started this long-term study that I I now try to keep going. My colleague, basically, we're banging our heads together. Why are they hibernating? We've turned off the lights, we've turned down the temperature, what's going on? And he came in one morning and he had an insight, and his insight was, oh, maybe we need to give them bedding. So he put in some paper towels, and the next day they were all curled up and hibernating. They made their little beds, they curled up, they hibernated, and that was it.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Well, the mattress is soft.

• 13:46Alie Ward?

  How are they getting through steel?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  They're rodents. They have teeth and they use them. I'm not putting my fingers near their mouth. Animals bite because I've been bitten by marmots.

• 13:54Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  You know, and so marmots bite.

• 13:57Alie Ward?

  Have you ever gotten stitches from a marmot?

• 13:59Speaker 02

  I've not gotten stitches, but I'm probably an error, what's probably viewed as an erroneous data point in some CDC database, if there is a CDC anymore, because I got bitten by a hibernating marmot, because we had the power outage and taking them out, and the baby, a pup, that was going through his first hibernation, it was about a kilo and a half. It was very cute and I was cuddling it and it had woken up enough that it just took a chunk out of my finger. So I went to the ER for that one.

• 14:23Alie Ward?

  Oh, do you have to worry about any, in the US, like plague or rabies or anything like that?

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Rabies, maybe there's been one groundhog, maybe, you know, but they don't really have rabies. Plague is an issue, but it's not an issue yet, really. So plague came over from Eurasia and the reason prairie dogs have been so decimated by plague is because they didn't evolve with it. Marmots have evolved with plague, the Eurasian ones have at least. So their populations go up and down and they sort of deal with that. There's a really interesting story about that. I'll tell you in a second. Right now, we're lucky, but I studied them in Gunnison County, Colorado, and Gunnison County has Gunnison prairie dogs, and I'm really concerned. Periodically plague comes and knocks out all the prairie dogs. You know, if you're studying prairie dogs, you get plague.

• 15:09Alie Ward?

  What's the problem?

• 15:10Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  You know, many people get plague who study prairie dogs, but you know that. So you do things to sort of, you're aware of your symptoms. Sometimes you're dousing them with insecticides, things like that.

• 15:21Alie Ward?

  Let's just take a quick, relaxing break from the horrors of the news cycle to learn about the plague. So marmots have fleas and fleas can carry plague, which is an illness caused by a bacterium known as Ersinia pestis. It's named after pestilence and a 19th century French-Swiss biologist named Alexandre Yersten. Don't worry.

• 15:43Alie Ward?

  You can get many different types of plague, such as bubonic, which produces big festering lumps in your lymph nodes. You can get septicemic, which gets into your blood. You can even get lung plague, called pneumonic plague. You can spread that to others by coughing and stuff. Symptoms of these three vary, but overall, you'll get headaches, weakness, a fever, chills, pneumonia, bulbous growths, and your extremities may turn blackish-purple. And the Black Death, taking place in the mid-1300s, wiped out up to 50 million Europeans, or about half the continent's population. Thanks, fleas. It also took 500 years to figure out what bacterium was responsible. And our buddy Alexandra finally figured it out by,

• 16:28Alie Ward?

  according to our other friend Wikipedia, obtaining specimens after bribing English sailors responsible for disposing of the bodies of plague victims, since the plague never really left us. So, we have antibiotics, though, but we don't always have answers, such as why marmots? Why? And one 2024 paper titled, "Different Characteristics of the Soil in Marmot Habits Might Be One of the Factors Influencing Your Cinnia Pestis." So, the preferred soil and the mineral content may make things ripe for fleas and plague, as is our increasingly Venus-like atmosphere. And for more on that, you can see the 2023 paper titled, "Climate-Driven Marmot Plague Dynamics in Mongolia and China",

• 17:09Alie Ward?

  which, this paper bursts forth from behind the curtains with jazz hands. It opens, "The incidence of plague has rebounded in the Americas, Asia, and Africa alongside rapid globalization and climate change." And if you're wondering, what's the most delicious way to contract the plague? I'd have to say Budog, which is a traditional Mongolian barbecue method. It involves tucking hot stones into the carcass of the mammal and then cooking it from the inside out. It's really just an analog to a microwaved Hot Pocket, but it's got more pure ingredients, because we have a treatment for plague, but we don't really have treatments for ultra-processed foods and microplastics. More on those later, actually, but yes. While there may be more than one way to skin a groundhog,

• 17:54Alie Ward?

  a lot of them might involve fleas looking for a new hot host like yourself. Also, if you love bloodsuckers, we have a two-part episode on ticks and tick-borne illnesses, as well as a two-parter on vampire lore.

• 18:07Alie Ward?

  And so do you have to make sure that the fleas are killed on them if they've got?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  What people do with prairie dogs in the plains where they study them, black-tailed prairie dogs in Colorado, is they douse every trap with permethrin, I think, that sort of kill the fleas. And they still get it.

• 18:19Alie Ward?

  Have you gotten plague? Do you know people that have gotten plague?

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:22Alie Ward?

  What hap- do you take antibiotics?

• 18:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, as long as you know that you're exposed to it, you're probably gonna be okay.

• 18:29Alie Ward?

  Like, how can you imagine just being like?

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Hi, honey, I came home with the plague.

• 18:33Alie Ward?

  From a prairie dog. Okay, so it already sounds like your field work is bananas. How often are you out and about in the field? I also just, out of the corner of my eye, saw that you have a marmot's license plate from Kansas. Is that, was that from your car?

• 18:51Speaker 02

  And Colorado. And Califor- and California.

• 18:54Alie Ward?

  The best ologists, I feel like their license plate is their study species. Like, we had a toothologist, squids license plate. There's a guy I've been trying to get on who's in the remote reaches outside of Albuquerque who studies skunks, license plate, skunks. So I do feel like that is the highest, like, that's top-tier ologist.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  I'm not going in the skunkologist's car.

• 19:19Alie Ward?

  I know. It's, this poor Subaru Outback is probably choking its way down the road. But when it comes to your, your field work, has it taken you all over? And is it taken you to Punxsutawney Phil? Like, have you been to Groundhog Celebrations?

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Ah, that's a sore point. Um, I have not been to Punxsutawney.

• 19:42Alie Ward?

  That's shocking.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know it is. I, you know, who wants to hang out with a bunch of drunk people in top hats or whatever?

• 19:49Alie Ward?

  That's a good point.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  But, well, it's cold. But with climate change, maybe I will go to Punxsutawney because it'll be warmer soon.

• 19:54Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  In the winter. Nonetheless, um, yeah, I've worked all over the world. I've been incredibly blessed to work pretty much everywhere. And I've worked with eight of the, you know, 15 species of marmots all around the northern hemisphere.

• 20:08Alie Ward?

  What do you think of Groundhog Day?

• 20:10Speaker 02

  I think it's an opportunity to celebrate animal behavior and educate people about animals and have a good time.

• 20:19Alie Ward?

  So for years, Dan's Lab has hosted, of course, Groundhog Day parties at the university. And at one point, has been interviewed by the LA Times on how to celebrate it. He told one newspaper outlet that his soirees involve "science geeks at his UCLA lab gathered to nibble, schmooze, and revel in groundhogery in all its magnificent splendor."

• 20:39Alie Ward?

  Okay, so what is happening in Groundhog's Day? They are hibernating. Are they in a burrow? Like, how deep are these groundhogs chilling out?

• 20:49Speaker 02

  So Groundhog's Day, so, I mean, you know, culturally, we build holidays on previous holidays. And Groundhog Day is half the way between winter solstice and spring equinox. And the pagans had a holiday to sort of celebrate the coming of spring. And again, in, you know, Northern Europe, they realized there are hibernators around there. And they were living close to hedgehogs. And hedgehogs hibernate. So, you know, they were using hedgehogs as this idea of predicting how long the rest of the winter would be. So when the Pennsylvania Deutsch, the Germans, came to Pittsburgh area, they were looking for an analogy. And they realized that woodchucks, groundhogs, were hibernating.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  And maybe they could be predict the winter. But the idea is that if it's sunny, then there must be a high-pressure system. So if the groundhog sees its shadow, it's sunny. There's a high-pressure system. Things probably aren't changing that much. And then winter will continue. If it's cloudy and the groundhog doesn't see a shadow, you know, then maybe the weather, things are changing and maybe spring will come early. Does it work? Does a coin flip work?

• 22:03Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, get, get the data. And by the way, there are competing groundhogs now. So Puck's Sunny Phil's been taken over by Weart and Willie and all of these other groundhogs. Truth.

• 22:14Alie Ward?

  Okay, so a rural town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is called Punxsutawney. And in this town, there's a place called Gobbler's Knob. And I'm watching as much heated rivalry as the rest of you. But trust me, this was actually just named for the presence of turkeys on a small knoll. But on Gobbler's Knob is a tree stump. And at the bottom of that tree stump is a small door. And locals and tens of thousands of tourists gather around February 2nd, starting around 3 a.m. Or if they're properly socially lubricated, I hear that people just don't go to bed. And then at 7:20 a.m. On February 2nd, a man in a top hat knocks on the small stump door with a cane. And out comes a groundhog named Phil.

• 22:59Alie Ward?

  And then the man holds up the groundhog like an infant Messiah and translates the groundhog's meteorological prognostication. And the man holds this betooshed rodent to his ear to translate from its native language. Now, if it's cloudy out and there is no sunny shadow to be seen, then that means that weather fronts are changing and spring will come sooner. Now, if he does see his shadow, it means winter's gonna continue. And Punxsutawney Phil, although captive groundhogs can live past 14 years, is well over 100 years old. Because these top-hatted locals meet with him in the summer and they give him a sip of Elixir of Life, which makes him immortal.

• 23:42Alie Ward?

  Now, what is actually happening, some scientists agree, is that they swap out the woodchuck when one dies. They've even used girl groundhogs, which in the wild would not be getting out of hibernation early because they're horny. But they deserve to have the job anyway. It's a high-profile and respected position. But when the groundhog is not forecasting, Punxsutawney Phil lives at the local library in a plexiglass enclosure with his wife, Phyllis, and their young children. Now, how eerily accurate are these predictions? Isn't it weird? We can ask a rodent about how many weeks of cold winter we have to endure? Well, the data doesn't lie. When it comes to weather prediction, groundhogs defy-

• 24:23Alie Ward?

  Logical odds. In the majority of years, the groundhog is wrong. They're wrong more often than they're right. It's over 60% wrongness. Like, it's worse than a coin toss. It doesn't even make sense. But other than having, like, no root in science or weather, does Groundhog Day ever go awry? Of course it does. Of course it does. It's a groundhog in public. One mayor in 2015 put his ear up to translate the message from "groundhog-ese", as they say, and the groundhog bit his earlobe on camera. Another time, a groundhog squirmed out of the arms of its handler. It hit the pavement. It later died. It's not an easy role to play. It takes a toll. Now, the public is not unscathed either. Past groundhog festivities

• 25:05Alie Ward?

  have involved an open casket funeral of a groundhog, eliciting whales from onlooking children. There's been hot gossip, too, like Wyarton Willie, which was a white-furred groundhog, was so rare, he was nearly irreplaceable, and officials kept his 2020 death under wraps for nearly two years. He was dead one year, and they tossed a hat out in the snow, never explaining why. And they later had to say, like, "He's dead." He had a successor, and then in 2023, that successor, it's widely assumed, was responsible for infanticide of his own children, who were found dead in their burrow. And then that was kept a secret for a while due to bad publicity. So Ontario's Wyarton Willie has left a legacy

• 25:49Alie Ward?

  of scandal. It's rocked the marmot world.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  And, you know, and turned into a movie, I think, about tracking down the source of what killed the groundhog.

• 25:59Alie Ward?

  Oh, what did they find out?

• 26:01Speaker 02

  I mean, it died.

• 26:02Alie Ward?

  Yeah, it died. What about Groundhog Day? Bill Murray movies. Groundhog Day.

• 26:10Speaker 04

  Weatherman Phil Connors is spending the day in Puxitawney, Pennsylvania. I'm reliving the same day over.

• 26:20Alie Ward?

  Have you seen it more than once?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Of course, I've seen it more than once.

• 26:22Alie Ward?

  Okay, just checking, just checking. I wasn't sure if you're like, that was such a misrepresentation of Groundhog.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, they chew their things and bite people and, you know, they probably don't drive trucks, but, I mean, really, it's a Buddhist movie. It's not about groundhogs.

• 26:37Alie Ward?

  Just about the, the living life over and over again.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  And trying to improve over time. But I mean, there was a New Yorker essay about this years ago about, you know, oh, well, blah, blah, blah, you know, all major religions see something in Groundhog Day about self-discovery and improvement and being better to others. And so Groundhog Day is, is more of a metaphorical thing in the movie.

• 26:59Alie Ward?

  You know, speaking of future, past, reliving, do you feel like you were destined to work on marmots or did you land into it accidentally?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  I used to get paid to bicycle around the world.

• 27:12Alie Ward?

  How?

• 27:13Speaker 02

  Uh, I didn't get paid a lot. I mean, I had sponsors, you know, and this is before cell phones and influencers and things like that. So I just sort of wrote stuff and took pictures and got sponsors to help pay for my trips bicycling around the world. And I got into Davis for grad school. I didn't know what I was going to study. I knew I wanted to just be international, maybe conservation-y, but I also was really into behavior. And I'm bicycling with an old girlfriend around, we tried to bicycle around India, Nepal, Pakistan. We tried to bicycle around the Himalayan Karakoram. China blocked our attempts to two places. We got into, you know, Nepal and couldn't get over. They wouldn't let us in. So we bicycled around the northern areas of Pakistan, the Karakoram. And so I get

• 27:53Speaker 02

  up to northern Pakistan and it's gorgeous. And I find myself on the border of China, camping in a place called Kuncharab National Park. And there are marmots everywhere and they're super social and there are foxes everywhere. There's snow lepers, we didn't see them. And it's like the marmots were fighting the foxes off and away from them. And I'm like, this is pretty cool. And I said, I wonder if I could, you know, study these guys here. So I ended up looking at any predator behavior. And I was looking at any predator behavior of these guys and thinking about how do you think about the riskiness of different behaviors cognitively? So I was doing experiments in northern Pakistan in a super intact predator community with these beautiful marmots in an uninhabited

• 28:35Speaker 02

  meadow, you know, up at 14,300 feet, um, you know, dying and getting very strong.

• 28:41Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God. Do you still bicycle a lot?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  Now I'm a slug.

• 28:45Alie Ward?

  No, you're not. I was gonna say, you look like you're out there doing a lot of fieldwork.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  I'm falling apart. My New Year's resolution is something I can achieve. I'm gonna gain five pounds and start smoking cigars.

• 28:57Alie Ward?

  I'm gonna start every morning with a martini.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Maybe every evening.

• 29:01Alie Ward?

  Yeah, just make it, lower the bar.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Lower the bar. Don't beat yourself up on resolutions. Do something you can achieve.

• 29:09Alie Ward?

  So we have pledged to absolutely ruin ourselves, but what about groundhog physique?

• 29:13Alie Ward?

  Okay, talk to me a little bit about anatomy, because you mentioned that they have big ears. And for animals, animals that live in the cold, that's surprising to me. Would they lose a lot of heat?

• 29:22Speaker 02

  I mean, this is sort of an enthusiast's description, right? So groundhogs have relatively bigger ears than other ones. They're not rabbits.

• 29:32Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Not even pika. So no, they have pretty small ears.

• 29:36Alie Ward?

  But they are round and cute, like a bear's, which also helps them conserve heat. And for more on how bears do not truly hibernate, you can see our urology episodes on bears, or the thermophysiology episode with Dr. Shane Campbell-Staten about body heat.

• 29:50Alie Ward?

  And then, how are groundhogs living? They're grumpy and they're solitary, for the most part? Do they live in underground subway systems? Do they dig one burrow that they hang out in? Are they grabbing plants from the roots?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  It's really hard to dig out a marmot burrow. I spent a lot of time with engineers trying to design little things that could, motors that could go into marmot burrows. We failed completely, because if you imagine in good habitat, maybe not woodshocks, groundhogs, but some of these more alpine ones, because most of them live in alpine areas. You know, a good marmot burrow is, imagine dumping a dump truck full of cinder blocks and then putting soil over that. So you get these pinch points, and those pinch points, it turns out, are really important, because all marmots pretty much are unfortunately prey to things that kill them from the sky, lightning bolts, eagles, hawks, if you're small. Things that chase them, foxes and canids, cougars and snow leopards, badgers and bears.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  So, you know, they have to deal with all these forms of predation. In the long-term study in Colorado, we've discovered that it's not about food that influences where marmots are or where marmots persist, it's actually safety.

• 31:01Alie Ward?

  So, location, location, location, neighborhood over local dining options.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  The irony is when you think about a happy marmot in the end of the year, it's like a bread loaf. I mean, it's super fat. And I think of like a squeeze tube of them trying to squeeze through, you know, get away from badgers coming after them. So, bottom line, I've not dug up burrows. People have excavated groundhog burrows, which are in more soily areas or rooty areas. And, you know, they can be tens of feet, tens of meters long. A main burrow typically has multiple entrances, they may have a hibernacula in that. But in their territory, in their home range, they have escaped burrows as well. And some individuals may have multiple main burrows.

• 31:44Alie Ward?

  You need to know that a groundhog burrow has a better layout than my house. There are ample, winding hallways. They've got a toilet chamber, complete with layers of grass, like an eco-friendly composting toilet. There is a room for sleeping with a grass mattress, organic, usually. They got a nursery for the kiddos. They have a walk-in pantry for food storage. At different times of the year, a groundhog may offer affordable housing to its neighbors, like skunks or a writhing clot of garter snakes. There are booby traps in the form of dead-end tunnels to fool predators who get disoriented, like they're on the set of severance. The front entrance of a burrow is a tidy mound of dirt, swept out of their fine homes.

• 32:27Alie Ward?

  This driveway they build also affords the groundhog's little panoramic view to take in the sunset with a cocktail or keep an eye out for things that want to kill them. During their hibernation, males get up earlier than the females and then they go door to door, hoping to bone, or they get into tooth fights with other marmot hotties.

• 32:44Speaker 02

  What's really funny, watching them come out in the spring, sometimes of the snow, if you're really lucky. We ski around in the spring, my happiest time of the year. And, you know, we go where we know the marmots are hibernating and all it is is a blanket of snow. And then one day there might be a hole. And if we're really lucky, we know where the burrows are, kind of. We're looking, looking, looking, looking, looking on the snow-covered slope and suddenly a hole appears, a nose appears and a bunch of fleas fly out of the burrow.

• 33:10Alie Ward?

  No.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  So I've seen it a couple of times. So that's sort of imagined emergence. Now, if I lived surrounded by my fleas all winter, what would I do the first thing? What would you do? You'd go find a new burrow.

• 33:22Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Sometimes they use different burrows after they emerge.

• 33:25Alie Ward?

  What are they eating to get so big? They're vegan and they're underground. How are they getting so chunky? Are they eating roots?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  They don't eat anything underground. They basically eat above-ground stuff.

• 33:37Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  And they don't typically drink. They get their moisture through vegetation that they're eating. So if there's a killing frost in October or September, that pretty much kills the vegetation, dries things out, and then they probably hibernate after that.

• 33:52Alie Ward?

  Do they ever just run out of fuel hibernating?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's overwinter mortality is a huge source of mortality. Only 50% of marmot babies born in one year will be alive the next year. And they emerge and if it's a good year, if there's a lot of, you know, insulation in the snow and they have a good burrow and whatever, they come out and they're fat. I mean, they haven't lost a lot of weight over winter. But if it's still a snow-covered, which it is some years, you watch them waste away and lose weight because there's nothing to eat. So getting up too early is can be costly if there isn't the food for them to eat.

• 34:23Alie Ward?

  Have you ever thought for publicity reasons to launch a fat groundhog week?

• 34:27Speaker 02

  No, I would launch a fat marmot week. We've talked about that, but by the end of the season, my team is so burned out. We have a five-month field season. I'm there about two and a half months. We should do that. It's like everyone's like, I want to go home.

• 34:38Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  You know? But yes, we at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory where I work, we're talking about starting a fat marmot week.

• 34:45Alie Ward?

  I feel like you should. Would it, when would be peak time for that?

• 34:48Speaker 02

  September, but that's when we have to come back and teach and.

• 34:51Alie Ward?

  Right, your dance card's a little full, right?

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:54Alie Ward?

  You need to, Holly, you need to get a social media person on it. Just be like one person that wants to launch fat marmot week.

• 35:03Speaker 05

  There must be someone.

• 35:04Alie Ward?

  Um, I have so many questions from listeners. Can I ask them? Sure. Okay. And I will ask them, but not before a quick break for sponsors of the show who make it possible to donate to a cause of the ologist choosing. And this week it's going to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, which is home to one of the largest animal migrations of field biologists. They provide logistical support for scientists and students, including access to living quarters, research laboratories, and protected research sites. And in a rapidly changing world, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory sustains our quality of life by accelerating discoveries about the ecosystems that replenish the world's air, water, and food supplies. Perhaps our donation can go toward social media for Fat Marmot Week. So a donation will go to them thanks to sponsors of the show who make that possible.

• 35:48Alie Ward?

  How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you

• 36:33Alie Ward?

  have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing an email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, do it Squarespace. So head to Squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're

• 37:16Alie Ward?

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• 37:54Speaker 06

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• 38:47Alie Ward?

  Okay, listener questions submitted via patreon.com/ologies, where you also can join for as little as a dollar a month and support the show. So let's burrow into your mailbag. Let's gorge on your questions. Francesca Huggins lives in Kentucky.

• 39:00Speaker 05

  Hi, Ally. I live in Louisville, Kentucky, and right by the Ford plant, there is a hill that's about a block long and about six feet tall. And it is host to what I can only describe as a commune of groundhogs. My daughter and I are always racing to see who can count how many we see, and we've seen 22 on that hill at one time. It's also crazy that none of them ever seem to have been hit by cars. I've never seen any roadkill groundhogs on that road, thankfully. So I'm just wondering if this number of groundhogs is pretty common for a community? And also, how they manage to stay so safe in such an industrial area?

• 39:36Alie Ward?

  Are they living in condos?

• 39:39Alie Ward?

  Of 22 groundhogs?

• 39:41Speaker 02

  So, groundhogs are not that social.

• 39:43Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  So, if you have a good meadow, you can have lots of mothers with their kids sticking around, but then pretty much everyone disperses away. Maybe they settle in that meadow and maybe it's just a really good space for them to live. Maybe they don't have dogs eating them or coyotes. But groundhogs per se are not supposed to be that social. We can have in a meadow, you know, 60 animals and that's the facultatively social one species. The more social ones you'll have in large alpine meadows, you'll have a family group with 10 to 20 individuals and another family group with 10 to 20 individuals, et cetera, et cetera. So, groundhogs often are more spread out than that. But again, what's a mass? If something ranges from 2.5 to 5 kilos,

• 40:26Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  You know, from 6 to 12 or 15 pounds a year, how big are groundhogs?

• 40:32Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  What's a group size if groups are varying constantly? I study social behavior. I don't know what a social group is.

• 40:39Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  I mean, is it who emerges from hibernation? Is, which is kind of what we use in many cases. Is it when the yearlings disperse and the babies are up? I mean, what's a social group when things are so much in flux?

• 40:50Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  We like to come up with easy ways to describe things, but I think studying marmots makes you think about a number of things. And one of those things is the sort of relativistic nature of how we study things.

• 41:00Alie Ward?

  And they get makeovers internally every year, right?

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:04Alie Ward?

  They kind of, they're reborn and then they go back into, I feel like there's Buddhism in that too, right?

• 41:11Speaker 02

  You know, there's Buddhism everywhere if you start looking for it.

• 41:14Alie Ward?

  Like if you've been feeling off lately, one of the Buddhist four noble truths is what's called dukkha, which stems from a root meaning a loose axle on a cart or having a bumpy ride. And dukkha means pain or suffering or just general unease, maybe seeking something that won't last, like a dopamine hit. We all know about that. Some say that loneliness is a form of dukkha. And in 2023, US Health and Human Services issued a report titled, "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation." And it noted that loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling. It harms both individual and societal health.

• 41:53Alie Ward?

  It's associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. It continues, the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with physical inactivity. So for human organisms such as yourself, Dan says.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Not being super social is about as costly for your longevity as smoking. So we study the socially plastic species, yellow bellied marmots. Turns out that many ways we're looking at sociality, the more social animals are, the less likely they are to survive, the shorter they live, the less reproductive success they have, particularly for females. So there are some benefits of sociality, but we're also finding lots of costs of being too socially integrated with others.

• 42:45Alie Ward?

  What does that do?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  What's that do?

• 42:46Alie Ward?

  Yeah, like if you are too socially integrated, does it, what risks are there?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Well, you're, you're less likely to survive the winter. You're more likely to die over hibernation, maybe because if everyone's having a good time over the summer, they interfere with each other's hibernation over the winter and maybe, we don't know. We want to put instruments in them and understand that.

• 43:04Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  How many of them get funded for that? That if you're social and you stick around and don't disperse, you're likely to be reproductively suppressed. That nice girls finish last if you're a marmot and that as you get older, you get crotchetyer and you get more successful. So that's.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  Don't follow that advice either. Don't be a marmot.

• 43:25Alie Ward?

  Okay, well, how about, how about their love lives? Ashton McCall, Madeline Fox, Savannah Stark, Mark Rubin, Josie Olsen. They want to know, Josie says, do groundhogs mate for life? How many groundhog babies do groundhogs have in one litter? And you said they were called pups? Is that correct?

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Pups.

• 43:42Alie Ward?

  But yeah, Madeline Fox wants to know, are they good parents? I'm sure good is relative. Do they eat their baby?

• 43:49Speaker 02

  So, um, everything I say you should not bring into your own life. But at the end of the day, marmots do everything and different species do different things. So I'm not going to talk about groundhogs per se. I'm going to talk about some of the variation we see in marmots. So groundhogs mate probably with one male, maybe two might be trying to defend them, but females more or less live alone and they probably have one male defending them. And maybe they mate with a couple, but that's because the males aren't successfully defending, you know, the females. They don't have a lot of paternal care, but there is maternal care for sure. In some cases, fathers might stick around and help a little more, but who knows? However. Yellow-bellied marmots, which are these facultatively, intermittently social, socially

• 44:34Speaker 02

  plastic species, kind of do everything. Sometimes in small habitat patches, we have one female with one male and they live a monogamous life. In some cases, the female's there and the male's galvanning around and visits her and whatever. In some cases, the male hibernates with the babies, the wife. In other cases, they don't. In some cases, the moms die and the kids can make it through alone. When we look at the female's perspective, often successful, big groups are big because females recruit more young to hang out with them. What does that mean? They let their daughters stick around. Their sons pretty much all disperse and some of the females stick around. So then you have these multi-female matriline, matrilineal social organization, mother and her offspring.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  And in those cases, we see all sorts of interesting things. Sometimes we see co-nursing. Sometimes we have lots of tension. We have mothers varying quite a bit in how, quote, "good" they are. Some ignore their kids, others are very attentive to their kids. Being attentive to your kids doesn't really help if you're living around a fox. The fox will kill all your kids. Right, right. There is reproductive suppression, whereas mothers are preventing younger daughters from reproducing. So a lot of the things we're studying in the yellow-bellied marmots are that sociality isn't necessarily good, but they're sort of forced into it. In terms of mating, sometimes there are multi-male groups. And in multi-male groups, pretty much, everything happens. We have one male defending all of the females and mating with all of them. We have one male defending subsets, males defending subsets of females and mating with them.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  And then we have mixed paternity.

• 46:05Alie Ward?

  What is mixed paternity exactly? So it's one litter that contains kind of a grab bag full of siblings and half siblings. And if you would, allow me to read from the Journal of Memology paper, "Mating System and Paternity in Woodchucks", which says that "animals seek copulations out of sight, not only of their social mates, but also of scientific observers." And it continues that multiple paternity occurred in 63% of litters. And overall, woodchucks in this natural population could be classified as, quote, "genetically promiscuous." And if you're wondering how researchers keep track of who is who in all of these love triangles, like watching the season premiere of a dating show. So the methodology section of the paper notes that,

• 46:50Alie Ward?

  quote, "we used a small artist's brush and commercial hair dye, clarel, balsam color, to apply a unique mark to each animal's hindquarters." And I also looked it up, and the shade of balsam is like a medium ash brown, offering superior gray coverage. And they have to use that because there's no commercial dye that is just for marmots.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Mixed paternity is not uncommon in mammals. So we can have that in yellowbellies. The other thing, that the most successful males, males typically have a tenure of about two years. The most successful males, so the whole idea of called reproductive skew. And reproductive skew is, you know, who's getting it? And in females, there's not a lot of skew. I mean, there is a little bit, but I mean, if you're alive and a breeder, you're getting it.

• 47:35Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  But males, it's a lot more difficult to get it.

• 47:38Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  And if you think about elephant seals, for example, you know, like one male elephant seal has all these females on the beach and, you know, fights them to death and has all the reproductive success.

• 47:48Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Right? So the most successful males have had hundreds of babies because they live more than two years and they start screwing their kids.

• 47:57Alie Ward?

  Oh, no!

• 47:59Speaker 02

  Don't try that at home.

• 48:00Alie Ward?

  So then, does that lead to a lot of birth?

• 48:04Speaker 02

  There is inbreeding that we can detect.

• 48:06Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  And it's not good for them.

• 48:08Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  But from a female's perspective, if there's only one male around, she has no choice.

• 48:14Alie Ward?

  Better to do a Greek tragedy of some sort.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Most of them make it, some don't. So something's better than nothing in the game of fitness. My favorite couple, mid-blood, I think he, he lived to eleven. And he was this old gray grizzled guy. I watched him emerge one April. We had a blizzard and that was his last year. I never saw him after the blizzard. And he was stiff and whatever, but for a number of years and he was one of the most successful males we've ever had. And he used to have a whole section of the valley and by the end of his life, he had thirteen ninety-nine, this grumpy female. And his daughter, he was a sweetheart. Some males are just like rough and whatever. He would go up and like greet her and she would smack him in the face. And you know, then he would like go and chase his daughter because he could.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  But you know, it's just, it's a Greek tragedy. I don't know. Tragedy, absolutely from his perspective.

• 49:10Alie Ward?

  Let's keep talking crotches. Tell me one horror story.

• 49:14Alie Ward?

  No, wait, anal genital instance?

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Anagenital distance.

• 49:17Alie Ward?

  Okay, tell me about that.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  So one of the more interesting studies I've done. That really woke up me to the consequences of modern pollution and particularly plastic pollution. Is a marmot story.

• 49:31Alie Ward?

  Oh no.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  So it turns out that if you're a mammal. You know, you're, if you're a male, you have a penis and an anus and those are a distance away. If you're a female, you have vagina and anus and those are closer to each other. So people, maybe people like me, measure something called anogenital distance. Now it also turns out that if you're a rodent, you have lots of siblings. And you can imagine. All the babies all in the uterus, two uteri, like a pea, and then the pea pods are the babies growing up.

• 50:06Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  And a guy named Frederick Vamssal was looking at the development, the effect of hormones on development.

• 50:12Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  And with mice, mice, did little cesarean sections and figured out where the babies came from in their uterine horn, in their uterus.

• 50:23Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  And females surrounded by two males became more masculinized. So it also turns out if you're a mammal, you start off feminized and have to be de feminized. And you get de feminized by having little bursts of testosterone when you're in utero that begin sexual differentiation.

• 50:39Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  So he found that natural variation in the location you were in that pea pod influenced what you were exposed to, your siblings around you, the testosterone leaked through.

• 50:50Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  And females became more masculinized, the distance between their vagina and their anus increased. I mean, you can try this at home and measure people if you want, but you know.

• 50:59Alie Ward?

  Grundle studies.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  So we didn't know, we're not doing cesareans on these marmots, we study them in the wild. But a former postdoc, Rokel Monklus, said, well, you're measuring it in general. I just go, yes, like, I want to sort of start analyzing this data set. I'm like, yes. And what we discovered is that we could look at emergence sex ratio.

• 51:19Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  So we don't know, marmots are born, they probably live about 28 days in the burrow and are nursing, and then they emerge after about 28, 30 days. And they're more or less weaned. And we don't know who died in the burrow, and we don't know who was absorbed and reabsorbed. So the Russians who've studied all these, you know, marmots have found all sorts of really interesting reabsorption of embryos.

• 51:41Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  So there's all sorts of maternal control over what's going on.

• 51:44Alie Ward?

  So yes, mammal embryonic anatomy starts out female and then it de females. And many female mammals have more reproductive options than humans in some countries.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Any event, we catch the pups as soon as they emerge. So we can say, you know, of six babies, five were males and one was a female. So that is a male biased litter. Or four were females and two were males. That is a female biased litter. So it turns out that females in male biased litters are more androgenized. They have a greater anal genital distance. They engage in more sort of rough play and male like baby behavior, pup behavior. They're more likely to disperse, but if they don't disperse, they're less likely to breed as two year olds. So here is natural variation in hormones. We have some people from Berkeley, some toxicology lab who used to work at Rumbles. Oh, send me some marmot blood.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  I said, I'm a marmot blood. He said, we can find no evidence of chemical pollutants in this blood. This is cleaner than polar bears or anything else we've studied in nature. We never published that, but marmot blood should be the new standard for non polluted blood. They're living in nature. So pause a moment and ask yourself a question. Plastic pollution. We're all ingesting plastics. Our sperm counts are going down. You know, we're having all sorts of endocrinological issues. Phthalates, which are found to make plastic soft, turns out are testosterone mimickers. They mimic testosterone. The other plastic chemicals mimic estrogen. We are so screwing up the environment.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  And if we see in a natural population that is not polluted and we see natural variation having such profound effects on later behavior, survival, et cetera, reproductive success. You should be scared about what we're putting in the environment and, you know, what this is doing for this. Follow your inner marmot. Marmots are sentinels of our health.

• 53:46Alie Ward?

  And so the downstream effects could affect populations for eternity, essentially, right? Like if you have a, if you have a populations that continue to be influenced hormonally, let's say.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  I would worry about humans. I wouldn't worry about marmots.

• 54:01Alie Ward?

  How is their blood so clean?

• 54:03Speaker 02

  I don't know. They were looking for a bunch of toxins that are usually screened for, you know, chemical toxins and.

• 54:08Alie Ward?

  Oh, man. God, I feel like I'm half plastic in there.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  We're all half.

• 54:12Alie Ward?

  I know, I have no idea. Every time I, I read a new thing, I think, oh, well.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  You know, you shouldn't read so much. It's a really scary world out there.

• 54:23Alie Ward?

  So hormonal factors can impact behavioral changes and preferences. And we have an excellent neuroendocrinology episode. All about that we'll link for you. And keep in mind, in these cases with marmots, this is with some of the cleanest plastic-free blood scientists have come across. So, given the known endocrine disruption caused by environmental toxins, you can see our environmental toxicology episode. It's anyone's guess how animals and ecology will change more rapidly as pollution continues. And I'm also going to link a New York Times story, published today, January 13th, 2026, whose headline reads, "EPA to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution."

• 55:04Alie Ward?

  "In a reversal, the agency plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits and not on the monetary value of saving human lives," documents show. So, mm, no matter how shrill we scream, hungry predators are out there. Is a lot of the action and the drama happening underground or above ground? Like, when you're trying to observe this, do you have camera traps? And then you go from that, like, how?

• 55:31Speaker 02

  We spend an inordinate amount of time sitting, looking for things. And we spend a lot of time just sitting and watching animals. We spend over 1,000 hours a year just trying to look at what's going on above ground. In the spring, we can see things. As the vegetation starts growing, it's harder to see things. In the subalpine area, we work in Colorado. In Pakistan, it was phenomenal. I could sit on a ridge top and see, like, eight social groups in this meadow because there's, like, no vegetation. It was the most amazing place to watch marmots.

• 55:58Alie Ward?

  And-

• 55:59Speaker 02

  Aside from being hypoxic all the time.

• 56:01Alie Ward?

  I was going to say, you need oxygen and SPF for that, right?

• 56:05Speaker 02

  A lot of SPF.

• 56:06Alie Ward?

  Yeah, do you have an SPF that you recommend?

• 56:08Speaker 02

  Uh, the more the merrier, and use physical blockage.

• 56:11Alie Ward?

  Okay, so, like, you're, you're working with hats, you're working with-

• 56:15Speaker 02

  You know, I, I, I used to surf a lot, and I'm an alpine biologist, and I've been neurotic about the sun, and I cover myself. And now I'm just getting things carved off me.

• 56:24Alie Ward?

  Right. I know. It's that I'm at that age too, where I'm like, they're gonna have to start getting a melon baller out. You can also see our melanology episode for more on sun exposure and how and why your body makes pigments. Okay, Mel, Sarah, Magda Kawasaki, Spencer Hoydaway, Protect Trans Lives, Andrea Marie Squirrel Tree Regaro, A Guy Called Shane, Mish the Fish, Abigail Bartel, First Time Question Asker, Natalie J. I'm, I'm trying to read these as fast as I can. Michael Croza, Steve Hansen, Matt Thompson, Madeline Fox, and Michelle Garth.

• 56:56Alie Ward?

  How much wood could a woodchuck chuck? A woodchuck could chuck wood? Do they chuck wood? I have, I have that.

• 57:02Speaker 02

  I don't even know what chucking wood is.

• 57:03Alie Ward?

  Okay, thanks, because neither do I.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  Having said that, Ken Armitage, who started this marmot project that I inherited, wrote a book on marmots, and was looking into sort of northeastern, you know, indigenous culture. And it was possible that woodchucks were called wushicks by some particular group of people. So woodchuck came from wushick.

• 57:22Alie Ward?

  Oh, okay. And that North American indigenous word is in the Cree dialect of Algonquin. But groundhogs have this truly impressive number of nicknames, which I choose to believe means they're beloved. I feel like the more nicknames you have for someone, the more they live in your head. So feel free to call them woodchucks, ground pigs, ruckchuck, rockchuck, weensuck, weenusk, land beaver, red monk, whistle pig, thick wood badger, monax, munax, Canada marmot, or earthhog. You can also call the juveniles chucklings. And a mob of groundhogs is a coterie or a repetition. Now, other things you can say, of course, are how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Would chucking wood, I always figured it meant.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  Do you know what chucking wood is?

• 58:04Alie Ward?

  No, I figured it meant like wood chipping, but now I'm wondering.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  They're not beavers.

• 58:07Alie Ward?

  I know, but then I'm wondering, do they, are they chucking, like throwing it? Maybe? I don't, yeah, you think it's throwing it?

• 58:14Speaker 02

  They don't throw wood.

• 58:15Alie Ward?

  Okay, so then they, zero is, if they could chuck, though.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Well, I would like to chuck a lot of wood if I could.

• 58:20Alie Ward?

  I mean, I wonder if that would help.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  How much wood would you like to chuck?

• 58:23Alie Ward?

  A good amount until until I tear a rotator cuff sometimes. You know, I feel like it would be very cathartic. But I'm going to look into that and see if anyone has defined that, but.

• 58:34Speaker 02

  Beavers are the lumberjacks of nature.

• 58:37Alie Ward?

  All right, put the calculators away, nerds. Somebody already crunched the numbers for us. So in 1988, Richard Thomas, a wildlife biologist from upstate New York, figured this out. So first off, no whistle pigs are tossing wood around. Okay, but they are little excavating machines. And if they woke up on the right side of the bed, had a big 7-Eleven coffee, they can toss up to 35 cubic feet or like 10 cubic meters of dirt in a day, which weighs in at around 700 pounds or 320 kilograms in a day. 700 pounds. So do not waste natural resources by riddling ChatGPT with this one. Also, legend has it, if you were to ask Siri, she would say, well, since a woodchuck is really a groundhog,

• 59:22Alie Ward?

  the correct question would be, how many pounds in a groundhog's mound? When a groundhog pounds, hog mounds, which is 700 pounds. More wood than you can shake a stick at. Alexis Colley, Margot Hayes, both want to know. Margot says, why won't my dog stop trying to run down every single groundhog she sees? I know you don't know this dog personally, but dogs in general. What's going on there?

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Doesn't everyone like to chase a squirrel?

• 59:42Alie Ward?

  I mean, I guess a lot of people, it's wired in our brain to notice things and run after them.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  So we have two corgis. My wife's into agility and the older corgi is pretty well trained in certain ways. But, you know, and he's like marmot. So he's like, marmot, oh, marmot, I'll go find the marmot. So he chases the marmots. The marmots, of course, get back to their bros because he's a corgi.

• 1:00:03Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  He doesn't hurt the marmots.

• 1:00:05Alie Ward?

  Is, I think, as long as there's not taken a chomp. We did a porcupine episode and our editor, who lives in Canada, said that they they had a dog who was not very bright and went after the same dead porcupine in the woods twice and got quilled twice.

• 1:00:19Speaker 02

  So we had marmots living under a cat. Porcupines, by the way, the populations are down pretty much throughout North America, which is really weird. We used to have a lot of porcupines where I lived. They ate my deck in Colorado. I was pretty upset about that.

• 1:00:31Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  But at times we've had porcupines and marmots living under a cabin together. And at times I've had to take porcupine quills out of marmot faces.

• 1:00:39Alie Ward?

  Like they just figure like, I'm going to crash here. You're going to crash here.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  I love porcupines.

• 1:00:43Alie Ward?

  I do love them and I love watching them eat. And yes, we have a porcupine episode and yes, we include audio of them squeaky munching on items such as sweet potatoes and pumpkins and corn. And speaking of your corgis, Marta Wells wants to know, and so does Goblin Prince. Marta asks, why aren't they pets like cats? Would they make good pets or do they pee on themselves a lot and you have to feed them a lot of tubers?

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  I mean, I pee on myself a lot. I mean, you know, so I mean, you know.

• 1:01:08Alie Ward?

  I walked in here with doused pants.

• 1:01:11Speaker 02

  That shouldn't be a criteria for having a pet.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  So the social ones make good pets and a lot of people, a lot of people, there are Instagram feeds of people with house marmots. But researchers and colleagues of mine in Russia, many of them have had house marmots. And the social ones are super sweet and, you know, can be trained and they can be taken care of. A woman used to send me pictures and write me and call me sometimes from Utah in the mountains and had a marmot. But then, and she's sending me all these pictures. I think I have one around the corner of him eating Lay's potato chips and it's completely obese. It didn't hibernate, but then in the spring it disappeared. And she calls me in tears one day and she's like, she left. You know, why would she leave me? I'm like, well, maybe it was a coyote or maybe she dispersed because that's what they do. Marmots disperse, many of them disperse. But why would she leave me? Very sad.

• 1:02:00Alie Ward?

  I love her. I love her. If you have a pet marmot, do you have to let them hibernate? Like, you know how people bury their turtles in the winter? Do you have to give them like a freezer?

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Uh, no, you don't have to. And the people that have pets typically don't, they just let them get fat and feed them. And maybe they sleep a little more and I don't know, pet them. And there's some Russians that have these amazing Instagram of their marmots.

• 1:02:22Alie Ward?

  And I bet there are wildlife rehabbers that, that do that too, right? Taking an unreleasable marmot?

• 1:02:28Speaker 02

  In North America, it is illegal to have wild animals as pets.

• 1:02:31Alie Ward?

  Just a disclaimer. So yes, if you want to have a woodchuck roommate, only certified wildlife rehabbers need apply. Same with possums and squirrels and raccoons. And yes, we have an episode for each of those critters. Also, as I edited this episode. In my home that would be substandard for a groundhog, I had a fuzzy lump of woodchuck-sized potty-trained doggy snoring on my lap. So just like, get a dog or a cat, just get one of those instead. And for more on those, we have a recent episode on ethnosinology, all about how dogs evolved from wolves. And of course, we have a felinology episode. And that covers why your cats deserve a second litter box and a heated blanket. Our best buds, they're worth the trouble.

• 1:03:16Alie Ward?

  What about from, I guess, pets to pest? Adeline Berg, Elizabeth Shealy, Ricky G, Tricia C., Lauren McLean, Wynne, Vivian, Alex Erman, and Brianna L. Wanna know? Alex said, tips to keep them away from the garden? I have seen many a woodchuck raise a vegetable patch, which is fair for them, but sad for my salad. What do you do if you have a lot of backyard garden woodchucks? What do you do?

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Wouldn't you want to feed them?

• 1:03:44Alie Ward?

  I know.

• 1:03:45Speaker 02

  Wouldn't you want to sort of, you know, share your garden with the wildlife? Isn't this a teachable moment where you can? Aren't you blessed to have an animal that you can sort of look at up close and personal?

• 1:03:57Alie Ward?

  I, yes, yes. You could just-

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Mountain lion poop.

• 1:04:01Alie Ward?

  Mountain lion poop. Okay.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  And pee.

• 1:04:04Alie Ward?

  What about, can you put stuff in cages? Can you grow your food in an upground? You know what I mean?

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Years ago, sort of, so this was in the former Soviet Union, and they were in Kazakhstan or something. And there was a nuclear facility they were trying to marmot proof. And it's like, how deep does the fence have to go in order to? And how high does it have to go? Like, I don't know. They can dig deep if they want, but it sort of depends. And we've talked about that for a while. Then, at one of these marmot meetings in Switzerland, we're at a place called Marmot Paradise. It's above Montreux. And you take the train up, and these people ski in the winter there, and the train makes money in the winter. And they wanted to make money in the summer, so they sort of got marmots from all over the place. But I'm there at this conference, and my colleague and friend from Colorado is there. And he's kept, Greg Floran, he's kept marmots before. And he's looking at the fence, and he knows snow.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  And he's like, these marmots are going to emerge through a couple meters of snow in the spring, and that fence isn't tall enough.

• 1:05:02Alie Ward?

  Oh, no.

• 1:05:03Speaker 02

  So we don't know if they lost the marmots.

• 1:05:05Alie Ward?

  It's like Jurassic Park, but with marmots?

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Kind of, but I don't think marmots are not velociraptors.

• 1:05:11Alie Ward?

  Right, right.

• 1:05:12Alie Ward?

  I wasn't going to follow up on this, but I need to let you know that this Alpine destination, yes, it's called Marmot Paradise, does not have the highest reviews. Let us read from the book of TripAdvisor. One star. More like a high-security prison than a paradise. Chain-linked fences topped with barbed wire. Poor marmots. If you are looking forward to the marmots, you will be disappointed. Another review, written in French, was titled scandaleux, meaning outrageous or disgraceful. And the review translated to read, "There is only one marmot left next to the restaurant, which seems to be bored and waiting for deliverance from death." Others wrote, "Average for humans, hell for marmots, paradise for no one.

• 1:05:55Alie Ward?

  Absolutely horrendous, unworthy of anyone's life." And a final review led with, "Smelly." The website reports, thankfully, Marmot's Paradise has been permanently closed. I didn't see any reviews from the last few years, so I'm hoping all the critters are set free. Now, for actual wild, happy marmots, I understand that Washington's Mount Rainier is the prime destination. One social media post I saw explained that. "At Mount Rainier, I heard the sound of a little girl screaming. I ran to save the little girl. It was a marmot." Of course, they're right. But don't terrorize them. Just keep a distance, use a long lens. Don't give them any reason to shriek in your presence. Let's keep it chill.

• 1:06:35Alie Ward?

  But, okay, speaking of teeth, I was thinking, like, we have gopher cages over some of our native plants, because we're like, we would sometimes see patches of poppies getting just like a bouquet snatched underground. So we're a constant war with our gophers. I'm curious, you mentioned that they can chew through stainless steel, which is absolutely insane to me, but like, you couldn't-

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Chew through their welds, break the cages. That's crazy.

• 1:07:01Alie Ward?

  Can you, if you had like a garden bed that had that kind of like mesh, you know, galvanized, whatever, could they break that into that?

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  So, you know, I study animal behavior and I'm really interested in human wildlife interactions and what we perceive as conflicts. And, you know, if you can redefine what a conflict is, that's the best thing.

• 1:07:18Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  If you really want to grow vegetables there, you're going to declare war. And, you know, there, the general thing is, you know, make it harder for them to get to something and you make it easy for them to get to others. So maybe you have some sacrificial, you know, tulips or tubers for them. They don't eat tubers, but I mean, you know, whatever for them to eat. And that might be good. And then you protect other stuff with fencing and you can fence them out, the same way you can fence deer out.

• 1:07:42Alie Ward?

  Okay. Well, you mentioned they don't eat tubers.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Maybe they eat tubers, but I mean.

• 1:07:46Alie Ward?

  Maybe they do. But in general, Victoria Shapen, Madeline Fox, Sarah Vanderkleed, Sarah E. G. and Shannon Dermody want to know, yeah, what kind of things do they eat? Shannon wanted to know, do they eat bird eggs? Like grassland bird eggs?

• 1:08:00Speaker 02

  They typically don't eat bird eggs. So some squirrels are much more omnivorous than marmots. So the marmots that I've looked at and read about, they're pretty much vegetarians. You know, they eat plants. They might eat some insects. You see insects in their poop, but that's probably incidental. Or, you know, there is infanticide in some species. So when I say, don't try this at home, don't do this at home either. I mean, these more social species, the most social species, there's bad stuff that happens. So males will come in and kill all the babies.

• 1:08:29Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  And then, you know, chase away the male and then try to be the male for the next year. Kind of like lions. Females sometimes engage in infanticide as well. It's a little less common, but there isn't obviously cannibalism associated with the infanticide. It really seems to be reproductive competition in the males.

• 1:08:46Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:46Speaker 02

  Females not so sure, but the golden marmots I studied in Pakistan, infanticide was as important as predation for first summer mortality.

• 1:08:55Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  About 25% of the kids were killed by other marmots and about 25% were probably killed by predators.

• 1:09:02Alie Ward?

  You know, people are fascinated by true crime and I feel like it's got nothing on marmots.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we, marmots are soap operas.

• 1:09:10Alie Ward?

  They're really like Dateline should just take up marmots if they really want to bring the drama. But what about Chelly Bean, redhead scientist, and Colby Evans want to know what prompts a groundhog to start digging and how are they digging these tunnels and burrows? Are they ever popping into abandoned ones? When it comes to home building, what tools do they have growing out of their bodies?

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  So, since we're talking about zen-type statements.

• 1:09:38Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  You know, my insight after a lot of study was marmots are where they've been.

• 1:09:43Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  Just focus on that, find your inner eye. You know, marmots are where they have been. There are good areas and bad areas, and there's intergenerational transfer of these burrows. So, you know, on average, animals live about three and a half years, four and a half years. They die, and other ones, their descendants come in, or sometimes new animals come in and take over the burrows. When we've had huge population explosions, you see them dig new burrows. These typically aren't good burrows. They probably get killed in them. The good places where they're living are good places where they've lived before. So, they dig, they renovate. You see them digging with their claws, you see them moving rocks out with their mouth, you see them making piles, you see them pushing piles, you know, with their nose. So, they're well-equipped, they're rodents.

• 1:10:26Alie Ward?

  Do they have tails?

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  Of course they have tails.

• 1:10:28Alie Ward?

  What kind of tails do they have?

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  Well, they're not as bushy as tree squirrels, but they have a bushy tail. And they use their tail for communication. And the long-tailed marmot, the golden marmots I studied.

• 1:10:37Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Speaker 02

  Subspecies of the long-tailed marmots really use their tails a lot.

• 1:10:40Alie Ward?

  What about groundhogs?

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  Groundhogs have tails, they use their tails.

• 1:10:44Alie Ward?

  This was a question from Anna Ward, Mel, Justin Murphy, Stratwijc, and Adam Foot. They want to know, do groundhogs communicate with high-pitched or low-frequency tones or both? They say, I feel like I've heard them squeak, but underground, it seems like low vibrations would work better. Stratwijc wanted to know, I'd like to hear the whistle of a whistle pig and why this usually solitary creature vocalizes. How are they communicating? Is it chirps and whistles? Is it tails?

• 1:11:11Speaker 02

  So, in an incredible bout of good luck, when I was just finishing my PhD and I was using alarm calls to scare marmots, to understand how their attention was compromised, to understand the risks of being engaged in different behaviors, when you're playing, you're focusing on your play partner, not on predators, it's risky. Play is risky, so therefore you play next to your burrow. I said, I really want to study the evolution of alarm calling in marmots. People were saying, oh, well, referential communication is something you want to study. Word-like communication. And I'm like, marmots are a great system to study the evolution of this. And I wrote a postdoc proposal and got funded to go around the world and continue studying marmot screams and whistles and chirps and whatever.

• 1:11:48Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  So the first thing you should realize is don't believe anything you read because I was unable to find any strong evidence that they have word-like communication. They communicate risk a variety of different ways, which are super cool. Some call more, some call faster.

• 1:12:14Speaker 02

  But it's not as though they have one type of whistle or chirp for an aerial predator and one type for a terrestrial predator.

• 1:12:21Alie Ward?

  Mm.

• 1:12:21Speaker 02

  As do vervet monkeys. Vervet monkeys are pretty cool. As do chickens, as do a lot of, some species, not all. Some primates, not all primates have word-like communication for different sorts of predators. They may label them.

• 1:12:32Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  But they communicate a lot of different, risk a lot of different ways. The Vancouver Island marmot almost went extinct, down to less than 50 in captivity, now up to about 300 and something, 400 and something in the wild.

• 1:12:42Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  Major and ongoing conservation work trying to keep those guys alive, um, had five different alarm calls. And not only that, they probably had simple syntax in that when I did playbacks where I would vary the order of calls, they responded differently.

• 1:12:59Alie Ward?

  No.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  So who knows? Almost went extinct. We almost lost knowledge of language by losing the Vancouver Island marmot, which looks like a bear cub and is absolutely adorable.

• 1:13:09Alie Ward?

  Was it, um, habitat loss? Was it hunting? What, what did it?

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  A combination of high alpine logging, which, so they only live on Vancouver Island. High alpine logging seemingly brought them down to suboptimal habitat and associated with the logging roads. Vancouver Island has a remarkably rich wolf and cougar population.

• 1:13:30Alie Ward?

  Mm.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  And the cougars and wolves were eating them and they would go along the logging trails, eat them. So it was a bad scene.

• 1:13:37Alie Ward?

  And their alarm calls did not save them from wolves or loggers.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Um, we have a paper on yellow-bellied marmots that sort of suggests that those who call more die younger. So calling doesn't seem to be a good personal thing to do, but it may help others.

• 1:13:52Alie Ward?

  Oh, loose lips sink ships.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Loose lips sink ships.

• 1:13:55Alie Ward?

  Oh, man. What's a big myth about a marmot or a groundhog that you're so sick of having to bust? Or maybe you're thrilled to bust a myth about it?

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Have they chuck wood?

• 1:14:05Alie Ward?

  That's top of the list. Top of the list. There's no wood chucking that happens, even if they could. What about, what's something that sucks about your job?

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  I love my job. I have the best job in the world. Getting funding for it. I mean, I'm, so I'm running this long-term study. We've just finished our 64th year. We're planning our 65th year of studying this individually identified population of marmots in Colorado. They can't get funding. I was blessed by having 11 years of NSF support for this long-term research stuff and we were trying to get renewals and the program officer said, we will never fund you.

• 1:14:36Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  And we're asking questions that no one else, very few people can ask. This project has been so productive. It's been so effective at educating people, in training people, and in coming up with biological and evolutionary insights that you don't get from, you know, short-term studies and we just can't get funded.

• 1:14:53Alie Ward?

  Even when you're at a place like UCLA, like a, a top school in the world?

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  It shouldn't matter the school you're at. It shouldn't matter the science you're doing. I think we're doing good science. It's very, very frustrating. And then I don't know how I'm going to keep this thing going.

• 1:15:05Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  And I feel really obligated to keep it going because my colleague and late friend, Ken Armit, just started this thing. It's the second longest study of individually marked mammals in the world. Um, the chimpanzees of the Gombe, which Jane Goodall started, was, is quote, the longest. These long-term studies, of which there are many, are priceless. Many of them fail. Many of them don't get passed on between generations. Many of them die when the person retires. Yet the insights we get from these are profound and they're really important. This is how we understand life around us. If we want to understand plasticity, if we want to understand how life, whether it's plant life or animal life, you know, is going to respond to a increasingly variable world, we need long-term studies

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  where we see different epochs of, of selection. And marmots are one of these really, you know, good long-term studies.

• 1:15:53Alie Ward?

  It's interesting, too, that we, you know, with this Groundhog's Day being such a holiday involving meteorology and climate and culture, that there's not something so obvious to most people that ecology and environment and climate are all very intertwined and they can tell us something about the other, you know?

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  I'm clearly not effective at writing proposals for peer review. Good at writing papers, but proposals aren't working.

• 1:16:26Alie Ward?

  We're gonna start with fat marmot week.

• 1:16:28Speaker 02

  Fat marmot week.

• 1:16:29Alie Ward?

  That's the first, that's the entry into it. Get some billionaires, have a pet project, is I guess what we all, that's our only, our only hope is a soft-hearted billionaire, which, as we know, doesn't exist. But what about the thing you love the most? I mean, I know you love your job. So many people can't say that they've seen all of these places, been to the top of Alpine Summit.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  So, I mean, basically, you have to follow your inner marmot. That's my advice. I follow my inner marmot regularly, and it takes me good places, and I experience interesting things and meet interesting people like today. But, you know, I love handling pups, because the big marmots, we don't knock our animals out. We put them in handling bags, and then we try to get blood from them, we try to get mouth swabs, and we try to put marks on them, we can study them, and we don't hurt them, and that's a good thing. But the babies, you can hold in a hand, and if you're holding it right, you don't get bit.

• 1:17:21Alie Ward?

  How small are they?

• 1:17:22Speaker 02

  They fit in your hand.

• 1:17:23Alie Ward?

  Oh, teensy, like a little-

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  You sort of grip them.

• 1:17:26Alie Ward?

  Like a baby rabbit, kind of?

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, a little longer.

• 1:17:29Alie Ward?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  Sometimes smaller.

• 1:17:31Alie Ward?

  Oh, my gosh, I want to see a pup I R L.

• 1:17:33Speaker 02

  Oh, you do? So what you want to do is you want to do a field biology-ologies and come to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and see a bunch of, you know, science geeks at work.

• 1:17:45Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God, I'm there. Oh, this has been so wonderful. I have, from the start, again, whistle pigs, woodchucks, groundhogs, didn't know the difference, and I feel like I am leaving here knowing what a marmot is, and I love them.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  Marmots are cool.

• 1:18:02Alie Ward?

  So ask groundhog people groundbreakingly not smart questions because they have dug up the research, they have the answers. Thank you so much to Dr. Blumstein for being on hand to open your office to the curiosities of me and our listeners via patreon.com/ologies. You too can join for as little as a dollar a month and submit questions. You can find out more about Dan and his lab at the link in the show notes. We'll also link to his charity of choice, as well as our website at alieward.com/ologies/marmatology, which will have so many links to studies and videos of groundhogs eating fruit. We're at Ologies on Blue Sky and Instagram. I'm at @Alieward on both. You can get merch via ologiesmerch.com. We have shorter, kids-safe, classroom-safe versions of Ologies called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S.

• 1:18:46Alie Ward?

  You can subscribe to for free wherever you get podcasts. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardoyer does the website. Nudging me out of hibernation and into the studio is scheduling producer Noelle Dilworth. Our top-hatted emcee is managing director Susan Hale. And the audio experts putting my pig whistles together are Jake Chaffee as director and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn squeaked us the theme music. And if you stick around to the very end of the show, I tell you a secret. I burden you with that. And this week, first off, the transcription software that we use cannot spell marmots. It either corrected it to marmite or Mormons, which was particularly unsavory when writing about the mating and the childcare habits of these creatures. But the other secret

• 1:19:30Alie Ward?

  is that Dr. Sarah McEnulty of the Toothology Squid episode is in town and staying at our groundhog den. And it's her birthday this coming Friday, January 16th. So if you're hearing this before then, again, Friday, January 16th, wish her a happy one on Instagram, Blue Sky. You can also maybe throw five or 10 bucks her way for her nonprofit Skype a Scientist, which is doing great work. One of the things I got her is a perfume that is based on the volatile organic compounds in squid ink. So I'm excited to take a whiff, I think. Okay, gather your friends for Groundhog Day because it's midwinter. Isolation and phone addiction caused by billionaire media conglomerates are killing us. So put on mittens, eat some veggies, stare at each other's shadows instead. Southern hemisphere, remember sunscreen. Okay, bye-bye.

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.

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