The Current - A Vancouver Island marmot baby boom

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

The Vancouver Island marmot — one of Canada’s most endangered species — is making a remarkable population rebound from near-extinction. A conservationist working to save the species tells us about this year’s record arrival of pups, and why the marmots aren’t out of the woods just yet.

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On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Well, that's a peculiar sound. What is that? I'm not stepping on a dog chew toy here in the studio. That, it turns out, is the whistle of the Vancouver Island Marmot, one of the world's rarest mammals. It is a chocolate brown rodent with a distinctive white snout.

It lives exclusively on, as the name might suggest, Vancouver Island. It is critically endangered, but conservationists, who were worried about its extinction, have some good news to tell you. This year, a record number of pups were born, more than a hundred of these marmot pups. Adam Taylor is the head of the Marmot Recovery Foundation. Adam, good morning. Good morning, Matt. What's it like for you to hear that little squeaky sound? Good morning, Matt. What's it like for you to hear that little squeaky sound?

Oh, it's always a special noise. You know, it's really rewarding when you get into the meadow and you hear a marmot whistle. It means they're upset at you, of course. But yeah, it also means they're there. And that's, yeah, it's a rewarding feeling to hear. You say, of course, because you know these mammals inside. And most of us just hear that noise and they think, what is that? Describe, I gave the little kind of thumbnail sketch. Describe the Vancouver Island Marmot in all its glory.

So the Vancouver Island Marmot is a sub-alpine dwelling ground squirrel. So it lives at high elevation in these mountain meadows that are created by snow action. So snow literally scraping trees off of the side of the mountains. And there they feed on wild flowers and grasses. And then as winter comes to escape the really long, harsh winters of the high mountains, they go underground. And for seven months of the year, like right now, they're hibernating. Their body temperature drops, their breathing rate drops, their heart rate drops.

And for the next, well, until the spring, they're going to be living entirely off of their stored body fat. And then they've got a really short season once they wake up to get out, feed, and regain all of that body condition for the next winter. What do you love about them? Oh, everything. I mean, they are an amazing animal to work with.

I mean, I love that they're unique. They're one of the few endemic mammal species. So in all of Canada, there's only five mammal species that live just in Canada and nowhere else in the world. And this is the largest of them. So it's uniquely ours. I mean, I do love all wildlife and I've worked with other endangered species, including endangered slugs and endangered snakes prior to joining the Vancouver Island Mermaid Recovery Effort. I really, and I say this as context, I really don't believe that how cute a species is

has anything to do with how important it is to conserve that species. But having said that, I mean, Vancouver Island marmots are incredibly cute. There's just no getting around that. I mean, there are these, you get into these alpine meadows and you'll see especially the young marmots,

the pups and the yearlings, they're running around, they're wrestling with each other, they'll be pushing each other, and then they'll pause for a moment and then they'll touch noses. And this is a way that Vancouver Island marmots pair bond. So you'll see the young and their parents literally can boop noses as a way of building those social relationships. And yeah, they're just, they're fantastic animals. And of course, they're important in their ecosystems too. I mean, they are living in an extremely harsh ecosystem. And Vancouver Island marmots on our island, they're the only mammal species that's really digging as much as they are. And their role in meadows is we're still trying to understand it,

but we know from other marmot species that, you know, turning over soil makes a huge difference there. There's associations between marmots and higher levels of plant biodiversity in alpine ecosystems. We know that other species use the burrows, the diggings that the marmots create for various parts of their life cycle. So they're an amazing animal to spend time with and an important animal in their ecosystem. So we heard the whistle earlier, that was right? That's right, yes. That was an alarm call. That was actually a marmot that was in the process of being released. And very stressful moment for that marmot.

Okay, I want to play another marmot sound. Have a listen. What's going on there? So that's a keel. That's what we call it. It's a noise that only Vancouver Island marmots make. So it's a unique call to the Vancouver Island marmot. And what's special about that one is that it seems to be a contact call between young and adults. So we only hear that call when there's either pups or yearlings in the meadow. So oftentimes it's our first indication when we're hiking into a meadow in the early summer.

It's our first indication that there's actually pups there. We'll hear that call. And as soon as you hear it, you know that there's going to be young around. And Vancouver Island mermen have more vocalizations than any other marmot species in the world. And that one is one of the really unique ones that as far as we know, only Vancouver Island marmots have that particular contact call. The kia. The kia. That's right. I have to admit, that's a bit of a made up word. I just like saying it, that's all.

But I'm not going to try and mimic the call for you, but yeah, that's what we call it. I said in the introduction that these marmots are critically endangered. How close have they come to dying out entirely? So in 2003 there were fewer than 30 Vancouver Island marmots left in the wild. That year we could only find 22. So that's about as close as you can get to extinction as is possible and still have some kind of hope for recovery. How much of that was our fault?

Well, I mean, it's really hard for us to pin that down exactly because nobody was really paying attention to the Vancouver Island marmot as their population really declined. So they live in very harsh, remote ecosystems. But having said that, you know, the best available evidence we have today suggests that Vancouver Island marmots have been around Vancouver Island probably for about two million years. So this change feels like it was pretty recent and post-colonization. So just in the past hundred years and probably just in the past few decades. So it is the result.

I think it's fair to say it's almost certainly the result of our actions and the results specifically of landscape changes that we've made on the island. So the way that Vancouver Island marmots survive, you have to imagine that they're living in these kind of meadows in between a sea of trees and glaciers and mountaintops. So there's these small isolated patches of landscape that the marmots actually use. In each of those pockets, in each of those colonies, you might have a small kind of village of marmots,

maybe 10, maybe 30, maybe in the past, we would have had colonies of 100 or more. But any small population of any species is always extremely vulnerable to extinction. So what really made it possible for Vancouver Island marmots to survive was not the size of their colonies, but the ability of marmots to move between them. So marmots, when they're about two years old, they leave their natal colony, the colony that they were born in, and they go off to find another Vancouver Island marmot colony.

And that is an incredibly important, this dispersal is an incredibly important part of the marmot's life cycle. It provides a rescue effect for colonies that have got into trouble. It provides genetic exchange for these colonies. And it seems like we disrupted that process. And we did that in a number of ways. We created population sinks. So logging areas, when you clear an area to a marmot, that looks like a meadow. So these marmots were being born in their alpine meadows, and they would see an area that had been recently logged, and they would move into that thinking that that was, you know, maybe an easier journey than going off to find another actual natural vancouver island marmot colony but the problem with those areas that have

been recently logged is that the trees they are going to regrow and as they regrow we lose the meadow and the marmots unfortunately they can't survive they get eaten very quickly by predators if they can't attack them in open space. So we created these cut blocks that stopped, that attracted marmots, created population sinks. We also did other things, like we created Strathcona Dam in Strathcona Provincial Park, which created a huge lake. And unfortunately, that lake is right in the middle of the core part of Vancouver Island marmot habitat. This set of mountain ranges on either side of that lake where there were in the past

and we're rebuilding today these Vancouver Island marmot colonies. And in the past, they would have been exchanging members across that valley bottom all the time, but they're not strong swimmers. They're not going across a lake. So the creation of that hydroelectric dam effectively drew a sharp line and isolated those colonies on either side of that lake and again isolated colonies if something doesn't happen to the colony over time then the colony is eventually going to become inbred because it's not receiving dispersers and we did see that at

the beginning of the recovery effort there was at mount Washington, a colony where the marmots were highly inbred because they hadn't received any dispersers probably for many, many years. So the good news story, as I started out with this, was that there's this record number of pups that were born, more than 100. Does that suggest that the marmots are out of the woods? It is fantastic news that we have this 108 pups this year. It's incredible news, but it certainly needs context. It does not mean that the species is safe. This is still a critically endangered species, and that number

definitely needs some context so that's more pups than we've ever seen in the wild and it tells us a couple of really important things one of the big things it tells us is that the adults are in good body condition so the adults are thriving in the wild and we know that because marmots have this uh really kind of harsh life cycle we always think of hibernation as being fun, but it takes a huge toll on a marmot's body. And so when they come out of hibernation, they breed immediately. I mean, they are literally reproducing maybe even in the burrows before they've dug their way out of hibernation in the spring. So to be able to breed at all means that the female marmots have to be in tip-top body shape.

And that's work that they have to have done in the wild the year before. So all of these pups means that these female marmots, they are managing that. And that's really, really important. And of course, these 108 pups, they're the next generation of Vancouver Island marmots. So that's fantastic news. They're the next generation of Vancouver Island Marmots, so that's fantastic news. But having said that, it is really important to understand that pups have the lowest survival among marmots. It's going to take them three years before they get to adulthood.

And even in normal circumstances, maybe one in five to one in six of these young pups is actually going to survive until they're ready to reproduce themselves. So we are over the moon about this, and it really is good news for the species, but it is not the end of the road for recovery for the Vancouver Island marmot. I feel like I know more about marmots than I could have possibly even imagined going into this conversation. And now I want to see them. So I have to come out to the island to have a look. Adam, this is really interesting news. And good news stories, particularly when it comes to nature, aren't particularly prominent these days. So I'm glad that we had a chance to talk to you about this.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thanks for telling us about your work. Adam Taylor is executive director of the Marmot Recovery Foundation. He's in Cobble Hill on Vancouver Island. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.