Ologies with Alie Ward - Marmotology (GROUNDHOGS) with Daniel Blumstein

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

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. Visit the Blumstein Lab and follow Dr. Blumstein on Google ScholarA donation went to the Rocky Mountain Biological LaboratoryMore episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Sciuridology (SQUIRRELS), Hydrochoerology (CAPYBARAS), Castorology (BEAVERS), Erethizonology (PORCUPINES), Urban Rodentology (SEWER RATS), Mammalogy (MAMMALS), Procyonology (RACCOONS), Lutrinology (OTTERS), Urocyonology (LITTLE GRAY FOXES), Witchology (WITCHES & WITCHCRAFT), Thermophysiology (BODY HEAT), Acarology (TICKS), Vampirology (VAMPIRES), Environmental Toxicology (POISONS + TRAIN DERAILMENT), Road Ecology (ROAD KILL)400+ Ologies episodes sorted by topicSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Oh, hey, it's the lady next to you at the salad bar covering up her iceberg lettuce with spring greens, Alley 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. You 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. Thank you to everyone out there in Ologiesmerch from Ologiesmerch.com. And for $0,000, 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-S-E-S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-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. 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 Smollogis. 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. Okay, so marmotology, 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. 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 marmits 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 ice tea onto my crotch.

It's so soaked. Like, it's not a little wet. It's soaked like I had hosed myself off. This is what happens when you do it. interview person. You really never know what you're going to get. Sorry about my pants. 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 a clown. We went up to his office where he has all sorts of skulls and marmot art, even a roadkill groundhog that he and his wife, Janice, taxidermyed themselves. And we chatted all about the rodent d'jeure, 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 a marmot as a pet? Why their blood, boggled science and the wandering etymology behind their aliases with animal behaviorist, conservationist, field biologist, professor, and marmotologist, Dr. Daniel Blumstein. Dan Blumstein. He him? Right?

Okay. This is news to me as of about 15 minutes ago. A groundhog is a woodchuck? There are 15 species of marmits. Okay. Groundhogs are one of those species. And other name for groundhogs are woodchucks. I had no idea.

I thought they were different animals. We have a holiday named after them. And it's about behavior and climate and weather and what's not to love about woodchucks. The fact that they are a Venn diagram that is just one circle is astounding me. What about whistle pig? What's up with that? Whistle pig is a common name for some marmits. Okay.

People call yellow-bellied mormits whistle pigs. But in general, woodchucks are the least social of the 15 species of marmits. Don't talk to me. Babies emerge and then disperse in their first year of life. They may settle around their mom. And my friend and colleague, Chris Mayer, at University of Maine, is studying Woodchuck behavior in detail. and it's shown that there's a little more sociality than most people think about when they look at woodshucks. 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. 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 out pine marmits. You know, you should not use marmits as a model for our behavior.

There's all sorts of sort of sort of stuff going down with marmits. You really want to know? I do. So a groundhog is the type of marmot. Yes. Not all marmots are groundhogs. Correct. Correct.

Right? What's the range of size? Because I picture a groundhog, I picture it like a beefy cat. They're all about cat size. Okay. The Himalayan Marmota, Hermit, Marmota, Hemalayanana, robusta. I think the robusta, it's not like a beer. or a coffee, it's because it's big.

But most of them are sort of cat-sized animals. But what's the size? I mean, they double their mass every year, right? Every year they double? They hibernate. Marmots are the biggest of the true hibernators. Bears don't hibernate. Bears estivate.

Bears can't lose enough body heat to properly hibernate. So marmots lose their body heat. Not only that, we did a study where we borrowed animals from the wild, brought them back to the lab, hibernated them, put them back to the wild, we're done with them. And it turns out they actively surprised. their metabolism and temperature, which is super interesting. Yellow-bellied marmots are incredibly efficient hibernators. In big ones, at the end of the year, are about five kilos, which is pretty big. That's a big cat. They burn when they're in deep torpor, a gram of fat a day. A gram of fat a day. So they

got to get chunk up before they hibernate? Yeah, so basically biomedical researchers study mormits in part to understand how you can be obese without having health consequences. So they don't get all the things that we get if we eat like a marmot. Actually, marmots are vegetarian, so maybe we should eat like marmots. Is it a difference between white fat and brown fat? Well, they have both. And my friend who did the research on this Walter Arnold, formerly in Germany, it 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. So one of them is easier to burn during the winter for heating oil and the other provides that insulation. So what's really

interesting is, you know, you might think it's easy to study what an animal eats. It's actually really hard to study one 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 plants and and different parts of the same plant have different fatty acid compositions. So what they're eating, the specific fatty acids they're eating in a particular ratios are important for putting on these different sorts of body fat. And walk me back to what exactly is a marmot? Is it a rodent?

Is it a... What is a marmot? Well, I would say that the king of rodents, but Koppibara are the kings of rodents. Yeah. I love Koppi barra. But marmots are the kings of the ground squirrels. So they're related to... prairie dogs and ground squirrels a little less related to tree squirrels. There are lots of species

of ground squirrels around the northern hemisphere and some in the southern hemisphere. Prairie dogs are only in North America and marmits have a whole Arctic distribution. They're found around the northern hemisphere but not in the southern hemisphere. So heads up, a marmot in general, it's a big huge ground squirrel that can weigh up to 15 pounds or seven kilograms. It can be up to two feet long and there's about 15 or so species. They're among, 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 scuridiology episode about squirrels and our capy bearer episode

in which we discuss the Pope's decision to classify them as fish. And then what about groundhogs? Groundhogs have a really interesting distribution. I think they go down into Georgia and they sort of go a swath across North America and end up in Fairbanks, Alaska. Oh. So this asocial grumpy marmot. And they're a little bigger than other species because they're not a fish in hibernators. They lose weight really quickly. So they get really fat and they lose a lot of weight.

And groundhog is really cute because they have really big ears. You look at them like, that's a groundhog. 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 quaca having a bad day. just pissy. And Dan also studies yellow-bellied marmits, 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, that's kind of mean. It's pretty cold. Speaking of. Marmits 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, 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. 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. Picking up a living. Picking up a living,

furry stone is not in the physics that I've been taught. How low does their body temperature get? So there are ground squirrels, Arctic ground squirrels, that can get their body temperature below zero Celsius, below 32. They have antifreeze. Pretty cool. Is anyone studying brownhogs for like biomedical applications? People are doing nasty things to groundhogs to understand, you know, obesity and how you can

be obese without having problems of obesity because they get obese every year. They double their mask. They have to put on fat and energy in order to not eat for seven or eight months. Marmits 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 were using them in Russia, Soviet Union, for bio-weapons research. because they harbor some diseases. A lot of them have plague in Europe. But then they have other things as well.

So this one guy was like, oh, yeah, my KGB colonel came to me one day and said, you know, if the marmots break out one more time, you will be fired, you know. So when we brought these into captivity to borrow them, to hibernate them, we put them in stainless steel welded rabbit cages. And the first thing they did was break the stainless steel 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 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. Well, the mattress is soft. How are they getting through steel? They're rodents. They have teeth, and they use them.

I'm not putting my fingers in their mouth. Animals bite, because I've been bitten by marmits. Yeah. You know, and so, marmots bite. Have you ever gotten stitches from a marmot? I'm not gotten stitches, but I'm probably an error, what's probably viewed as an erroneous data point in some CDC database, if there is a CDC anymore, because I got bitten by a hibernating mormit,

But 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. Oh, do you have to worry about any in the U.S. like plague or rabies or anything like that? Rabies, maybe there's been one groundhog, maybe, you know, but they don't really have rabies. Plague is an issue. But it's not an issue yet. Really? So plague came over from Eurasia, and the reason 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 study them in Gunnison County, Colorado. Gunnison County has Gunnison Prairie dogs, and I'm really concerned. And periodically, plague comes and knocks out all the prairie dogs. You know, if you're studying prairie dogs, you get plague. Wow. You know, many people get plague to study prey 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. Let's just take a quick relaxing break from the horrors of the new 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 Yersinia pestis. It's named after pestilence and a 19th century French Swiss biologist. named Alexandra Yerson. Don't worry, 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, 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, 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 title, different characteristics of the soil and marmot habitats 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 Marmit Plague Dynamics in Mongolia and China, 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 Budok, 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 skid a groundhog, a lot of them might involve fleas looking for a new hot host like yourself. Also, if you love bloodsuckers, we have a two-part episode on ticks and tick-borne illnesses, as well as a two-parter on vampire lore.

And so do you have to make sure that the fleas are killed on them if they've got... What people do with prairie dogs in the plains where they study them, Blacktail Prairie Dogs in Colorado, is they douse every trap with permaurethin, I think, that sort of kill the fleas. And they still get it. Have you gotten plague? No. No. No.

No. Do you take antibiotics? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, as long as you know that you're exposed to it, you're probably going to be okay. Like, how can you imagine just being like, Hi, honey, I came home with the plague. 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, I saw that you have a marmots license plate from Kansas. Was that from your car? And Colorado. And California. The best ologists, I feel like their license plate is their studies. species. Like we had a toothologist, squids, license weight. There's a guy I've been trying to get on

who's in the remote reaches outside of Albuquerque who studies skunks, license weight, skunks. So I do feel like that is the highest, like that's top tier ologist. I'm not going in the skunk ologist car. I know. 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 Paxatani, Phil? Like, have you been to Groundhawk celebrations? That's a sore point. I have not been to Paxatani. That's shocking.

Yeah, I know it is. You know, he wants to hang out with a bunch of drunk people in top hats or whatever. That's a good point. Well, it's cold. But with climate change, maybe I will go to Paxitani because it'll be warmer soon in the winter. Nonetheless, 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 15 species of marmits all around the northern hemisphere.

What do you think of Grandhawk Day? I think it's an opportunity to celebrate animal behavior and educate people about animals and have a good time. So for years, Dan's Lab has hosted, of course, Groundhawk 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 groundhoggery in all its magnificent splendor. Okay. So what is happening in Groundhogs Day? They are hibernating.

Are they in a borough? Like how deep are these groundhogs chilling out? So Groundhogs Day, so, I mean, you know, culturally, we build holidays on. previous holidays. And Groundhog days half the way between winter solstice and spring equinox. And the pagans had a holiday to sort of celebrate the coming of spring. And I guess in Northern Europe, they realized they're hibernators around there. And they were living close to hedgehogs. And hedgehogs hibernates. So they were using hedgehogs as this idea of predicting how long the rest of the winter would be. So when the Pennsylvania Deutsche, the Germans came to Pittsburgh area, they were looking

for an analogy and they realized that woodchucks, groundhogs, were hibernating and maybe they could 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, then maybe the weather, things are changing and maybe spring will come early. Does it work? Does a coin flip work? Yeah. I mean, you know, get the data. And by the way, there are competing groundhogs now. So Pucksittany Phil's been taken over by Warton, Willie, and all of these other groundhogs. Truth. Okay, so a rural town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is called

Punksitani. 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. And then the man holds up the groundhog like an infant Messiah and translates the groundhog's meteorological prognostication. And the man holds this betoothed rodent to his ear to translate from its native language. Now, if it's cloudy out and there is no sunny shadow to be seen, then that means that weather fronts are changing and spring will come sooner. Now, if he does see his shadow, it means winter's going to continue. And Punksitani 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. Now, what is actually happening, some scientists agree, is that they swap out the woodchuck when one dies. They've even use 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, Pung Satani Phil lives at the local library in a plexiglass enclosure with his wife, Phyllis, and their young children. Now, how eerily accurate are these predictions? Isn't it weird? We can ask a rodent about how many weeks of cold winter we have to endure? Well, the data doesn't lie. When it comes to weather prediction, groundhogs defy logical odds. In the majority of years, the groundhog is wrong. They're wrong more often than they're right. It's over 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 Groundhogese, 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 have involved an open casket funeral of a Groundhog, eliciting whales from onlooking children. There's been hot gossip, too, like Wyrton Willie, which was a white-furred groundhog, was so. 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 borough. And then that was kept a secret for a while due to bad publicity. So Ontario's Wyrton Willie, has left a legacy of scandal. It's rocked the marmot world. And, you know, and it turned into a movie, I think, about tracking down the source of what killed the groundhog. What did they find out? I mean, it died. Yeah, died. What about Groundhog Day?

Bill Murray movies. Groundhog Day. Freezing their butts off waiting to worship a rat. Weatherman Phil Connors is spending the day in Puxitone, Pennsylvania. I'm reliving the same day over and over. Have you seen it more than once? Of course I've seen it more than once. Okay. Just checking. Just checking.

I wasn't sure if you're like, that was such a misrepresentation of groundhogs. Well, I mean, they chew their things and bite people and, you know, they probably don't drive trucks, but I mean, really, it's a Buddhist movie. It's not about groundhogs. Just about the living life over and over again. And trying to improve over time. But I mean, there's a New Yorker essay about this years ago, about, you know, oh, well, blah, blah, blah, you know, all major religions. So they see something in Groundhog Day about self-discovery and improvement and being better to others.

And so Groundhog Day is more of a metaphorical thing in the movie. You know, speaking of future, past, reliving, do you feel like you were destined to work on marmots or did you land into it accidentally? I used to get paid to bicycle around the world. How? I didn't get paid a lot. I mean, I had sponsors. You know, and this is before cell phones and influencers and things like that.

So I just sort of wrote stuff and took pictures and got sponsors to help pay for my trips bicycling around the world. And I got into Davis for grad school. I didn't know what I was going to study. I knew I wanted to just being international, 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 and Nepal Pact. We tried to bicycle around the Himalayan car quorum. China blocked our attempts to two places.

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 car corn. And so I get up to northern Pakistan, and it's gorgeous. And I find myself on the border of China camping in a place called Kinshrab 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 the super intact predator community with these beautiful marmits in an uninhabited meadow, you know, up at 14,300 feet, you know, dying and getting very strong. Oh my God. Do you still bicycle a lot? Now I'm a, I'm a slug. No, you're not. I was going to say, you look like you're out there doing a lot of field work. I'm falling apart. My New Year's resolution is something I can achieve. I'm going to gain five pounds and start smoking cigars. I'm going to start every morning with a martini. Maybe every evening. Yeah, just make it lower the bar. Lower the bar. Don't beat yourself up on resolutions. Do something

you can achieve. So we have pledged to absolutely ruin ourselves. But what about groundhog physique? Okay, talk to me a little bit about a now. Because you mentioned that they have big ears. And for animals that live in the cold, that's surprising to me. Would they lose a lot of heat? I mean, this is sort of an enthusiast's description, right? So groundhogs have relatively bigger ears than other ones. They're not rabbits.

Okay. Not even pica. So, no, they have pretty small ears. But they are round and cute like a bears, which also helps them conserve heat. And for more on how bears do not truly hibernate, you can see our Orsonology episodes on bears or the thermophysiology episode with Dr. Shane Campbell-State and about body heat. And then how are ground hugs living? They're grumpy and they're solitary for the most part. Do they live in underground subway systems? Do they dig one burrow that they hang out in? Are they

grabbing plants from the roots? It's really hard to dig out 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 woodchucks, 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. 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 marmonds persist. It's actually safety. So location, location, location, neighborhood over local dining options. The irony is when you think about a happy marmot in the end of the year, it's like a breadloaf. 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 more soy areas or rooty areas.

And, you know, they can be tens of feet, tens of meters long. A main borough typically has multiple entrances. They may have a hibernacular in that. But in their territory, in their home range, they have escaped boroughs. as well. And some individuals may have multiple main boroughs. You need to know that a groundhog borough borough has a better layout than my house. There are ample winding hallways. They've got a toilet chamber complete with layers of grass like an eco-friendly composting toilet. There is a room for sleeping with a grass mattress, organic, usually. They got a nursery for the kiddos. They have a walk-in

pantry for food storage. At different times of the year, a groundhog may offer affordable housing to its neighbors like skunks or a writhing clot of garter snakes. There are booby traps in the form of dead-end tunnels to fool predators who get disoriented, like they're on the set of severance. The front entrance of a burrow is a tidy mound of dirt, swept out of their fine homes. This driveway they build also affords the groundhog's little panoramic view to take in the sunset with a cocktail or keep an eye out for things that want to kill them. During their hibernation, males get up earlier than the females,

and then they go door to door, hoping to bone, or they get into tooth fights with other marmot hotties. What's really funny, watching them come out in the spring sometimes of the snow. If you're really lucky, we ski around in the spring by happiest time of the year. And, you know, we go where we know the marmits 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 on the snow-covered slope, and suddenly a hole appears, a nose appears, and a bunch of fleas fly out of the burrow. No. I've seen that a couple times. So that's sort of imagine emergence. Now, if I lived surrounded by my fleas all winter, what would I do the first thing? What would you do?

You go find a new borough. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes they use different burrows after they emerge. What are they eating to get so big? They're vegan and they're underground. How are they getting so chunky? Are they eating roots? They don't eat anything underground.

They basically eat above ground stuff. Okay. And they don't typically drink. They get their moisture through vegetation that they're eating. So if there is a killing frost in October or September, that pretty much kills the vegetation, dries things out, and then they probably hibernate after that. Do they ever just run out of fuel hibernating? Yeah.

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 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 still is 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 can be costly if there isn't the food for them to eat. Have you ever thought for publicity reasons to launch a fat groundhog week? No, I would launch a fat marmot week. We've talked about that. But by the end of the season, my team is so burned out. We have a five-month 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. Yeah. You know? But yes, we at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory where I work, we're talking about starting a fat marmot week. I feel like you should. When would be peak time for that? September, but that's when we have to come back and teach. Right.

Your dance card's a little full, right? Yeah. 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. There must be someone. I have so many questions from listeners. Can I ask them? Sure.

Okay. And I will ask them, but not before a quick break for sponsors in the show who make it possible to donate to a cause of theologist choosing. And this week, it's going to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, which is home to one of the largest animal migrations of field biologists. They provide logistical support for scientists and students, including access to living quarters, research laboratories, and protected research sites. And in a rapidly changing world, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory sustains our quality

of life by accelerating discoveries about the ecosystems that replenish. the world's air, water, and food supplies. Perhaps our donation can go toward social media for Fat Marmot Week. So a donation will go to them thanks to sponsors of the show who make that possible. Okay, listener questions submitted via patreon.com slash 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. Hi, Ali. I live in Louisville, Kentucky. And right by the Ford plant, there is a hill that's about a block long and about six feet tall, and it is host to what I can only describe as a commune of groundhogs. My daughter and I are always racing to see who can

count how many we see, and we've seen 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. Are they living in condos of 22 groundhogs? So groundhogs are not that social. Okay. So if you have a good meadow, you can have lots of mothers with their kids sticking around,

but then pretty much everyone disperses away. Maybe they settle in that meadow and maybe it's just a really good space for them to live. Maybe they don't have dogs eating them or coyotes. But groundhogs per se are not supposed to be that social. We can have in a meadow, you know, 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 in that. But again, what's a mass?

If something ranges from 2.5 to 5 kilos, you know, from 6 to 12 or 15 pounds a year, how big are groundhogs? What's a group size if groups are varying constantly? I study social behavior. I don't know what a social group is. I mean, is it who emerges from hibernation? Which is kind of what we use in many cases. Is it when the yearlings disperse and the babies are up? I mean, what's the social group when things are so much in flux?

Yeah. We like to come up with easy ways to describe things, but I think studying marmots makes you think about a number of things. And one of those things is the sort of relativistic nature of how we study things. They get makeovers. internally every year, right? Yeah. They kind of, they're reborn, and then they go back into, I feel like there's Buddhism in that, too, right?

You know, there's Buddhism everywhere to start looking for it. Like, if you've been feeling off lately, one of the Buddhist for noble truths is what's called Dukkah, which stems from a root, meaning a loose axle on a cart or having a bumpy ride. And Dukha 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 Duccah. And in 2023, U.S. 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. It's associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease,

dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. It continues the mortality, 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, not being super social is about as costly for your longevity as smoking. So we study the socially plastic species, yellow-bellied marmots. It 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. What does that do? What's that do? Yeah, like if you are too socially integrated, what risks are there? Well, you're less likely to survive the winter, you're more likely to die over hibernation. Maybe because if everyone'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. Yeah. Have many people to get funded for that.

That if you're social and you stick around and don't disperse, you're likely to be reproductally suppressed. That nice girls finish last if you're a marmot. And that as you get older, you get crotchettier and you get more successful. So that's... Don't follow that advice either. Don't be a marmit. Okay.

How about their love lives? Ashton McCall, Madeline Fox, Savannah Stark, Mark Rubin, Josie Olson. They want to know, Josie says, do groundhogs mate for life? How many groundhog babies do groundhogs have in one litter? And you said they were called pups. Is that correct? Pups. But yeah, Madeline Fox wants to know, are they good parents? I'm sure good as relative. Do they eat their baby? So everything I say, you should not bring into your own life. But at the end of the day, mormits do everything and different species do different things. So I'm not going to talk about groundhogs per se. I'm want to talk about some of the variation we see in marmits. 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, intermediately social, socially 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 females there, and the male's galvanting around and visits her and whatever. In some cases, the male hibernates with the babies and the wife.

In other cases, they don't. In some cases, the moms die, and the kids can make it through alone. When we look at the female's perspective, often successful, big groups are big because females recruit more young to hang out with them. What does that mean? They let their daughters stick around. Their sons pretty much all disperse and some of the females stick around.

So then you have these multi-female matrilines, matrilineal social organization, mother and her offspring. And in those cases, we see all sorts of interesting things. Sometimes we see co-nursing. Sometimes we have lots of tension. we have mothers varying quite a bit in how, quote, good they are. Some ignore their kids. Others are very attentive to their kids. Being attentive to your kids doesn't really help if you're living around a fox.

The fox will kill all your kids. 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 belly environments 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, and then we have mixed paternity. 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 some. 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 and all of these love triangles, like watching the season premiere of a dating show. So the methodology section of the paper notes that, quote,

We used a small artist brush and commercial hair dye, clarel, balsam color, to apply a unique mark to each animal's hindquarters. And I also looked it up in the shade of balsam is like a medium ash brown, offering superior gray coverage. And they have to use that because there's no commercial dye that is just for marmits. Mixed paternity is not uncommon in mammals. So we can have that in yellow bellies. The other thing that the most successful males, males typically have a 10-year-old. of about two years. The most successful males, 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. But males, it's a lot more difficult to get it. Right. And if you think about elephant seals, for example, you know, like one male elephant seal has all these females on the beach and, you know, fights them to death and has all the reproductive success. Right. So the most successful, males have had hundreds of babies because they live more than two years and they start screwing their kids. Oh, no. Don't try that at home.

So then does that lead to a lot of birth issue? There is inbreeding that we can detect. Okay. And it's not good for them. Yeah. But from a female's perspective, if there's only one male around, she has no choice. Good. Better to do a Greek tragedy of some sort.

Most of them make it. some don't. So something's better than nothing in the game of fitness. My favorite couple, mid-blood, I think he lived to 11. And he was this old gray, grizzled guy. I watched him emerged 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 1399, 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. But, you know, it's just, it's a Greek tragedy, I don't know. Tragedy, absolutely from his perspective. Let's keep talking crotches. Tell me one horse story. Annal genital distance? Wait, anal genital instance? Anaginatal distance. Okay, tell me about that. So one of the more interesting studies I've done that really woke up me to the consequences of modern pollution and particularly plastic pollution is a marmot story. Oh, no. So it turns out that if you're a mammal, you know, if you're a male, you have a penis and anus, and those are a distance away.

And if you're a female, you have a vagina and an anus, and those are closer to each other. So people, maybe people like me, measure something called anogenital distance. Okay. Now, it also turns out that if you're a rodent, you have lots of siblings. And you can imagine all the babies in the uterus to uteri, like a pea, and then the pea pods are the babies growing up. And a guy named Frederick Mamsal was looking at the development, the effect of hormones on development. And with mice, mice did little cesare. sections and figured out where the babies came from in their uterine horn, in their uterus.

And females, surrounded by two males, became more masculinized. So it also turns out if you're a mammal, you start off feminized and have to be defeminized. And you get defeminized by having little bursts of testosterone when you're in utero that begin sexual differentiation. So he found that natural variation in the location you were in that peepod influenced what you're you were exposed to, your siblings around you, the testosterone leaked through, and females became more masculized. 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. Grondal studies. So we didn't know, we are not doing cesareans on these marmits. We study them in the wild. But a former postdoc, Raquel Monclos,

said, well, you're measuring it in general. Just like, 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. So we don't know, marmits are born, they probably live about 28 days in the borough 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 borough. And we don't know who is absorbed and reabsorbed. So the Russians who've studied all these, you know, marmits have found all sorts of really interesting reabsorption of embryos. So there's all. all sorts of maternal control over what's going on.

So yes, mammal embryonic anatomy starts out female and then at de-females. And many female mammals have more reproductive options than humans in some countries. In 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 antigenital 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 had some people from Berkeley, some toxicology lab. We used to work at Rumble. said, oh, somebody's some marmot blood. They said, we can find no evidence of chemical pollutants

in this blood. This is cleaner than polar bears or anything else we've studied in nature. We never published that, but marmot blood should be the new standard for non-polluted blood. They're living in nature. So pause a moment and ask yourself a question, plastic pollution. We're all ingesting plastics. Our sperm counts are going down. You know, we're having all sorts of endocrinological issues. Fowlates, 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.

And if we see in a natural population that is not polluted, then we see natural variation having such profound effects on later behavior, survival, etc., reproductive success, you should be scared about what we're putting in the environment and, you know, what this is doing for this. Follow your inner marmot. Marmots are sentinels of our health. And so the downstream effects could affect populations for eternity, essentially, right? Like, if you have a populations that continue to be influenced hormonally, let's say, I would worry about humans. I wouldn't worry about marmots. How is their blood so clean? I don't know. They were looking for a bunch of toxins that are usually screened for, you know, chemical toxins.

Oh, man. God, I feel like I'm half plastic in there. We're all half plastic. I know. I have no idea. Every time I read a new thing, I think, oh, well. You know, you shouldn't read so much. It's a really scary world out there.

So hormonal factors can impact behavioral changes and preferences, and we have an excellent neuroendocrinology episode, all about that. We'll link for you. And keep in mind, in these cases with marmits, this is with some. of the cleanest plastic-free blood scientists have come across. So given the known endocrine disruption caused by environmental toxins, you can see our environmental toxicology episode, it's anyone's guess how animals in ecology will change more rapidly as pollution continues. And I'm also going to link a New York Times story published today, January 13, 26, whose headline reads,

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

Like how? We spend an ordinary amount of time sitting, looking for things. And we spend a lot of time just sitting and watching animals. He spent over a thousand hours a year just trying to look at what's going on above ground. In the spring, we can see things. As the vegetation starts growing, it's harder to see things. In the subalpine area, we work in Colorado. In Pakistan, it was phenomenal.

I could sit on a ridgetop and see, like, eight social groups in this meadow because there's, like, no vegetation. It was the most amazing place to watch marmots. aside from being hypoxic all the time. I was going to say you need oxygen and SPF for that. A lot of SPF. Yeah. Do you have an SPF that you recommend? The more the merrier and use physical blockage.

Okay. So like you're working with hats you're working with. You know, 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. Right. I know. I'm at that age too where I'm like they're going to 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 Maurice, squirrel tree rigero, a guy called Shane, Mish the Fish, Abigail Bartel, first-time question asker, Natalie J, I'm trying to read these as fast as I can. Michael Crosa, Steve Hansen, Matt Thompson, Madeline Fox, and Michelle Garth, how much would could and would chuck chuck, but woodchuck could chuck wood. Do they chuck wood? I have to, I don't even know what chuckingwood is. Okay, thanks. Because neither do I. Having said that, Ken Armitage, who started this marmot project that I inherited, wrote a book on marmits and was looking into sort of northeastern, you know, indigenous culture. And it was possible that woodchucks were called

Wushiks by some particular group of people. So Woodchuck came from Wushik. Oh, okay. And that North American indigenous word is in the Cree dialect about Gonquin. But ground, Roundhogs 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, ruck chuck, rock chuck, wien suck, weanusk, land beaver, red monk, whistle pig, thick wood badger, monacks, monex, moonac, 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 wood, wood,

chuck, if a woodchuck could check wood. Would chucking wood, I always figured it meant. Do you know what chucking wood is? No, I figured it meant like wood chipping, but now I'm- They're not beavers. I know, but then I'm wondering, do they, are they chucking, like throwing it? Maybe. I don't, yeah, you think it's throwing it?

They don't throw wood. Okay, so then they'd zero is. If they could chuck, though. Well, I would like to chuck a lot of wood if I could. I mean, I wonder if that would help them. How much would you like to chuck? A good amount. 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. Beaver's are the lumberjacks of nature. 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 7-11 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 chat GPT with this one. Also, legend has it. If you were to ask Siri, she would say, well, since a woodchuck is really a groundhog, the correct question. would be how many pounds in a groundhog's mound when a groundhog pounds hog mounds, which is 700 pounds, more wood than you can shake a stick at. Alexis Cully, Margo Hayes, both want to know. Margo says, why won't my dog stop trying to run down every single groundhog she sees? I know you don't know this dog personally, but dogs in general, what's going on there?

Doesn't everyone like to chase a squirrel? I mean, I guess a lot of people, it's wired in our brain to notice things and run after them. So we have two corgis, my wife's into agility, and the old older corgi is pretty well trained in certain ways. But, you know, he's like, marmot. So he's like, marmot. Oh, marmot. Oh, I'm going to find the marmot. So he chases the marmots. The marmots, of course, get back to the bros because he's a corgi. Yeah. He doesn't hurt the the marmits. 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 had a dog who was not very bright and went

after the same dead porcupine in the woods twice and got quilled twice. So we had marmots living under a cat. Porcupines, by the way, the populations are down pretty much throughout North America, which is really weird. We used to have a lot of porcupines where I live. They eat my dad in Colorado. I was pretty upset about that. Yeah. But at times, we've had porcupines and marmots living under a cabin together. And at times, I've had to take porcupine quills out of marmot faces. Like, they just figure, like, I'm going to crash here, you're going to crash here. I love porcupines. I do love them. And I love watching them eat. And yes, we have a porcupine episode. And yes, we include audio of them squeaky munching on items such as sweet.

potatoes and pumpkins and corn. And speaking of your corgis, Marta Wells wants to know, and so does Goblin Prince. Marta asked, why aren't they pets like cats? Would they make good pets or do they pee on themselves a lot and you have to feed them a lot of tubers? I mean, I pee on myself a lot of lot of people. I mean, you know, I walked in here with doused pants. That shouldn't be a criteria for having a pet. So the social ones make good pets and a lot of people, a lot of people. There are Instagram feeds of people with house marmots. But researchers and colleagues of mine in Russia, many of them have had house marmits.

And the social ones are super sweet. And, you know, it can be trained and they can be taken care of. A woman used to send me pictures and write me and call me sometimes from Utah in the mountains and had a marmit. But then, and she's sending me all these pictures.

I think I have one around the corner of them eating lace 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. Mom is dispersed. Many of them disperse. But why would she leave me? It's very sad. 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? No, you don't have to. And the people that have pets typically don't, they just let them get fat and feed them and maybe they sleep a little more and I don't know, pet them. And there's some Russians that have these amazing Instagram of their marmots. And I bet they're wildlife rehabbers that do that too, right? Taking an unreleasable marmere.

In North America, it is illegal to have wild animals as pets. Just a disclaimer. So yes, if you want to have a Woodchuck roommate, only certified wildlife rehabbers need apply. Same with possums and squirrels and raccoons. And yes, we have an episode for each of those critters. Also, as I edited this episode in my home that would be substander, 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 felonology episode. And that covers why your cats deserve a second litter box and a heated blanket. Our best buds, they're worth the trouble. What about from, I guess, Pets to pest, Adeline Berg, Elizabeth Shealy, Ricky G, Tricia C, Laura McLean, Win, Vivian, Alex, Alex, Erman, and Brianna L. Want to know. Alex said, tips to keep them away from the garden. I have seen many a woodchuck raise a vegetable patch, which is fair for them, but sad for my salad. What do you do if you have a lot of backyard garden? Woodchucks, what do you do? Wouldn't you want to feed them?

I know. 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? Yes, yes. You could just. Mountain lion poop. Mountain lion poop. Okay. And pee.

What about, can you put stuff in cages? Can you grow your food in an upground? You know what I mean? Years ago, 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 that? does a fence have to go in order to, and how high does it have to go?

I'm like, I don't know. They can dig deep if they want, but it sort of depends. And we've talked about that for a while. Then at one of these marmot meetings in Switzerland, we're at a place called Marmot Paradise. It's above 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 Florenton, he's kept marmits before, and he's looking at the fence, and he knows snow, and he's like, these marmots are going to emerge through a couple meters of snow in the spring, and that fence isn't tall enough. Oh, no. But we don't know if they lost the marmits. It's like Jurassic Park, but with marmots? Kind of, but I don't think marmots are not Velaziraptors.

Right, right. I wasn't going to follow up on this, but I need to let you know that this alpine destination, Yes, it's called 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-link fences topped with barbed wire, poor marmots. If you are looking forward to the marmits, you will be disappointed. Another review written in French was titled Scandoulou, meaning outrageous or disgraceful.

And the review translated to read, There is only one marmot left next to the restaurant, which seems to be bored and waiting for deliverance from death. Others wrote, average for humans, hell for marmots, paradise for no one. Absolutely horrendous, unworthy of anyone's life. And a final review led with Smelly. The website reports, thankfully, marmots 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 marmits, I understand that Washington's Mount Rainier is a prime destination. One social media post I saw explained that at Mount Rainier, I heard the sound of a little girl screaming. I ran to say the little girl, it was a marmot. Of course, they write. But don't terrorize them.

Just keep a distance. Use a long lens. Don't give them any reason to shriek in your presence. Let's keep it chill. But, okay, speaking of teeth, I was thinking, like, we have gopher cages over some of our native plants because we would sometimes see patches of poppies getting. just like a bouquet snatch underground. So we're a constant war with our gofers. I'm curious. You mentioned that they can chew through stainless steel, which is absolutely insane to me. But like you can choose through their wells, break the cages. That's crazy. Can you, if you had like a garden bed that had that kind of like

mesh, you know, galvanized, whatever, could they break that into that? So, you know, I study animal behavior. And I'm really interested in human wildlife interactions. And what we're, perceive as conflicts. And, you know, if you can redefine what a conflict is, that's the best thing. Right. 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 to everything to get to others. So maybe you have some sacrificial, you know, tulips or tubers for them. Yeah. They don't need tubers, but I mean, you know, whatever for them to eat. And that might be good. And then you protect other stuff with fencing. And you can fence them out, the same way you can fenced

DRL. Okay. Well, you mentioned they don't eat tubers. Maybe they eat tubers, but I mean, they do. But in general, Victoria, Schapen, Madeline Fox, Sarah Vanderclyde, Sarah EG, and Shannon Dermody want to know, yeah, what kind of things do they eat? Shan wanted to know, do they eat bird eggs, like grassland bird eggs? They typically don't eat bird eggs. So some squirrels are much more omnivorous than marmots. So the marmots that I've looked at and read about, they're pretty much vegetarians. You know, 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. Yeah. And then, you know, chase away the male and then try to be the male for the next year. Kind of like lions. Females sometimes engage in 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. Female is not so sure. But the golden marmots I studied in Pakistan, infanticide was as important as predation for first summer mortality. Wow.

About 25% of the kids were killed by other marmots. And about 25% were probably killed by predators. You know, people are fascinated by true crime. And I feel like it's got nothing on marmots. Yeah. I mean, Mormons are soap operas. They're really, like, Dateline should just take up marmits if they really want to bring the drama. But what about Shelley Bean, Red Ahead 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 to abandon ones? When it comes to home building, what tools do they have growing out of their bodies? So, since we're talking about Zen type, statements. Yeah. You know, my insight after a lot of study was marmots are where they've been. Okay. Just focus on that, find your inner eye. You know, marmots are where they have been. There are good areas and bad areas, and there's intergenerational transfer of these boroughs. 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. Do they have tails? Of course they have. What kind of tails do they have? Well, they're not as bushy as ground, as tree squirrels, but they have a bushy tail. And they use their tail for communication. And the long-tailed

marmament, the golden marmots I studied, the subspecies of the long-tailed marmots, really use their tails a lot. What about groundhogs? Groundhogs have tails. They use their tails? This was a question from Anna Ward, Mel, Justin Murphy, Stratwegic, and Adam Foote. 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. Stratwegic wanted to know, I'd like to hear the whistle of a whistle pig, and why this you're usually solitary creature vocalizes. How are they communicating?

Is it chirps and whistles? Is it tails? 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 are saying, oh, well, referential. communication is something you want to study word-like communication. And I'm like, Mormons 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 marmots screams and whistles and chirps and whatever.

So the first thing you should realize is don't believe anything you read because I was unable to find any strong evidence that they have word-like communication. They communicate risk a variety of different ways, which are super cool. Some call more, some call faster. But it's not as though they have one type of. of whistle or chirp for an aerial predator and one type for a terrestrial predator, as do vervet monkeys. Vervent monkeys are pretty cool.

As do chickens, as do a lot of, some species, not all. Some primates, not all primates have word-like communication for different sorts of predators. They may label them. But they communicate a lot of different risk, a lot of different ways. The Vancouver Island Marmot, almost went extinct, down to less than 50 in captivity, now up to about 300-something, 400-something in the wild.

Oh, wow. Major and ongoing conservation work trying to keep those guys alive, had five different alarm calls. And not only that, they probably had simple syntax in that when I did playbacks where I would vary the order of calls, they responded differently. No. So who knows? Almost won't extinct. We almost lost knowledge of language by losing the Vancouver Island environment, which looks like a bear cub in this absolutely adorable. Was it habitat loss? Was it hunting? What did it? A combination of high alt-al pine logging, which, so they only live on Vancouver Island, high alpine logging

seemingly brought them down suboptimal habitat and associated with the logging roads. Vancouver Island has a remarkably rich wolf and cougar population, and the cougars and wolves were eating them, and they would go along the logging trails, eat them. So it was a bad scene. And their alarm calls did not save them from wolves or loggers? We have a paper on yellow-bellied marmits that sort of suggests that those who call more or die younger. So calling doesn't seem to be a good personal thing to do, but it may help others.

Oh, loose lips, sink ships. Loose lips, sink ships. Oh, man. What's a big myth about a marmit or a groundhog that you're so sick of having to bust? Or maybe you're thrilled to bust a myth about it. They chuck wood? That's top of the list. Top of list.

There's no wood chucking that happens, even if they could. What about what's something that sucks about your job? I love my job. I have the best job in the world. Getting funding for it. I mean, I'm getting funding. 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. Yeah, yeah. And we're asking questions that no one else. Very few people can ask that this project has been so productive. It's been so effective at educating people.

in training people, and in coming up with biological and evolutionary insights that you don't get from, you know, short-term studies. And we just can't get funded. Even when you're at a place like UCLA, like a top school in the world. It shouldn't matter the school you're at. It's not a science you're doing. I think we're doing good science. It's very, very frustrating. And I don't know how I'm going to keep this thing going.

Yeah. And I feel really obligated to keep it going because my colleague and late friend, Ken Armagh, just started this thing. It's the second longest study of individually marked mammals in the world. 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 an increasingly, variable world. We need long-term studies where we see different epics of selection. And marmots are one of these really, you know, good long-term studies. It's interesting, too, that we, you know, with this Groundhogs Day being such a holiday involving meteorology and climate and culture, that there's not something so obvious to most people that ecology and environment and climate are all

very intertwined and they can tell us something about the other, you know? I'm clearly not effective that writing proposals for peer review. Good at writing papers, but proposals aren't working. We're going to start with Fat Marmot Week. Fat Marmot Week. That's the first, that's the Andre, and do it. Get some billionaires have a pet project is I guess what we all. That's our only hope is a soft-hearted billionaire, which, 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. So, I mean, basically, you have to follow your inner marmot. That's my advice. I follow my inner marmotment regularly. It takes me good places and they experience interesting things

and meet interesting people like today. But, you know, I love handling pups. Because they're 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. We try to put marks on them. We can study them. and we don't hurt them, and that's a good thing.

But the babies, you can hold in a hand. And if you're holding it right, you don't get bitten. Oh, how small are they? They fit in your hand. Oh, jeancy. They sort of grip them. Like a baby rabbit, kind of? Yeah, a little longer.

Oh, my gosh. Sometimes smaller. Oh, my gosh. I want to see a pup IRA. Oh, you do. So what you want to do is you want to do a field biologyologies and come to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and see a bunch of,

of science geeks at work. Oh my God, I'm there. 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.

Marmits are cool. So ask groundhog people groundbreakingly not smart questions because they have dug up the research. They have the answers. Thank you so much to Dr. Blumstein for being on hand to overwork. open your office to the curiosities of me and our listeners via patreon.com slash ologies.

You two 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 alleyward.com slash ologies marmotology, 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 Allie Ward on both. You can get merch via ologiesmerch.com. We have shorter kids save, classroom save versions.

of ologies called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S. You can subscribe to for free wherever you get podcasts. Aaron Talbert, Admonds, the Ologies Podcasts Facebook group, Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardwired does the website, nudging me out of hibernation and into the studio is scheduling producer, Noel Dilworth. Our top-headed MC is managing director, Susan Hale,

and the audio experts putting my pig whistles together are Jake Chafee as director and lead editor Mercedes-Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburns 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 marmits. It either corrected it to marmite or Mormons, which was particularly unsavory when writing about the mating and the child care habits of these creatures. But the other secret is that Dr. Sarah

McAnulty 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 non-profit 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 squidding. 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.