Marmotology (GROUNDHOGS) with Daniel Blumstein

Summary

OLOGIES with Alie Ward
Episode: Marmotology (GROUNDHOGS) with Daniel Blumstein
Date: January 14, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Ologies dives deep into “Marmotology”—the study of marmots, specifically groundhogs—with marmot behavior and conservation expert Dr. Daniel Blumstein. Alie and Dr. Blumstein debunk common marmot myths, discuss the science and scandals behind Groundhog Day, explore marmot social structures, hibernation, health, environmental challenges, and address listener questions with humor and captivating field stories.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Marmots 101: Taxonomy, Species, and Social Structure

• Marmots Are Giant Ground Squirrels: There are about 15 marmot species. Groundhog = woodchuck = whistlepig—just different names or species within Marmota.

• "I had no idea. I thought they were different animals."
  – Allie Ward (04:36)

• Sociality Varies: Groundhogs (woodchucks) are the least social, with offspring dispersing their first year. Other marmot species (e.g., yellow-bellied) are “socially plastic,” forming matrilines; biology not meant to be a “model for our behavior!”
  – Dr. Daniel Blumstein (05:00)

[04:18] Meet Dr. Daniel Blumstein

▶️ Dr. Blumstein explains dogged research on sociality and why you should not use marmots as a model for romantic advice.

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Anatomy & Hibernation: The Science of Chonk

• Size and Weight
  • Marmots are about cat-sized; Himalayan marmots are the largest. Groundhogs can weigh up to 15 pounds (7 kg) and are up to 2ft long.
• True Hibernators:
  • Marmots, not bears, are the "kings of hibernators.” Bears only “aestivate.” Marmots can burn as little as a gram of fat per day while hibernating.
  • Their fat is both insulation and "heating oil," thanks to specific diets.
• Biomedical Insights:
  • Understanding marmots’ ability to become obese without ill health informs obesity research in humans.

Notable Quote (07:03):

"Biomedical researchers study marmots in part to understand how you can be obese without having health consequences."
– Dr. Daniel Blumstein

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Distribution and Behavior

• Where Marmots Live:

  • Across Northern Hemisphere, in North America and Eurasia.
  • Groundhogs: From Georgia to Alaska, less efficient hibernators, thus chunkier.

• Predators and Plague:

  • Marmots have to contend with many predators (hawks, foxes, badgers, even snow leopards).
  • Plague (Yersinia pestis) is historically significant; some Eurasian marmots co-evolved with it, prairie dogs (relatives) did not, leading to die-offs.

[13:46] Plague & Fieldwork Dangers

▶️ Fleas and plague are a persistent problem in fieldwork and can wipe out populations.

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Groundhog Day: Holiday, Myth & Meteorology

• Origins:
  • Groundhog Day is a hybrid pagan and European custom marking the midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox. Germans in Pennsylvania swapped hedgehogs for local hibernators—groundhogs—as weather predictors.
• Scientific Accuracy:
  • Groundhog predictions are less accurate than a coin flip (over 60% wrong!).
• Myths and Scandals:
  • Tales such as open-casket rodent funerals, succession scandals (Wiarton Willie), and the swapping of “Phil” groundhogs.

Notable Quote (25:36):

"Freezing their butts off, waiting to worship a rat."
– Dr. Daniel Blumstein, on the Punxsutawney Phil tradition

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Marmot Housing: Underground Marvels

• Burrow Systems:
  • Groundhogs and other marmots create complex burrows with multiple entrances, nurseries, toilet rooms, food storage, and even provide occasional “affordable housing” to other species like skunks or snakes.
  • Safety and predator avoidance, not food availability, are the main drivers in burrow placement.

[29:19] Underground Architects

▶️ Dr. Blumstein details the design, layout, and survival function of marmot burrows.

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Hibernation Biology

• Efficiency:
  • Marmots can dramatically lower their body temperatures (some arctic species even under 0°C—“antifreeze marmots!”).
• Risks:
  • High overwinter mortality if animals emerge too soon and encounter scarce food; only ~50% of pups survive their first winter.

Labs & Fieldwork:

• Keeping marmots in captivity requires creative problem-solving (they can escape steel-welded cages!); bedding was the missing link for hibernation to occur in labs.

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Human-Marmot Parallels: Loneliness, Sociality, and Costs

• Social Costs:
  • Unlike humans, more social marmots (especially females) have lower survival and less reproductive success.
• "The more social animals are, the less likely they are to survive."
  – Dr. Daniel Blumstein (42:37)

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Groundhog (and Marmot) Reproduction

• Mixed Paternity is the Norm:
  • Up to 63% of litters can have multiple fathers.
• Not Monogamous:
  • No “mate for life.” Social systems vary by species; yellow-bellied marmots have multi-female, sometimes multi-male groups.
• Infanticide:
  • Both males and sometimes females may kill young, mirroring behaviors seen in other mammals.

Notable Story [48:19]:

"The most successful males have had hundreds of babies because they live more than two years and they start screwing their kids."
– Dr. Daniel Blumstein

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Marmots, Pollution, and Hormones

• Anal-Genital Distance—as a Pollution Signal:
  • In rodents, endocrine-disrupting chemicals (plastics) can affect sexual development. In field populations with extremely clean blood, natural variation still affects behavior; pollution could have much larger impacts.

Notable Quote (54:08):

"Marmot blood should be the new standard for non polluted blood. They're living in nature."
– Dr. Daniel Blumstein

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Communication: Whistlepigs, Chirps, and Tails

• Alarm Calls:
  • Marmots make various alarm calls—not true "words" but risk-signaling. Vancouver Island marmots have five distinct alarm calls, possibly simple syntax.
• Loose Lips Sink Ships?
  • Frequent calling increases the risk of death for callers.

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Groundhogs as Pets and Pests

• Pets:
  • Social species may be tameable, but generally illegal to keep.
  • "Why would she leave me?"—a field tale of a marmot “pet” returning to the wild.
• Garden Pests:
  • Marmots love vegetable gardens. Exclusion is tough—deep/strong fences needed.
  • Dr. Blumstein’s advice: try to enjoy sharing your garden or use barriers, perhaps offer “sacrificial” plants for the marmots.

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Marmotology Myths & Listener FAQs

Do Woodchucks Chuck Wood?

"I don't even know what chucking wood is... Beavers are the lumberjacks of nature."
– Dr. Daniel Blumstein (57:23)

• The “woodchuck” name likely derives from an Algonquian word.
• In reality, groundhogs excavate 700 lbs (320 kg) of soil—not wood—a day.

Dogs & Groundhogs

• Dogs’ predatory chase instinct kicks in with groundhogs, but marmots are adept at dashing back to burrows.

Diet

• Marmots are primarily herbivores; may eat some insects incidentally, but don’t eat bird eggs.

Are They Good Parents?

• Varies widely by individual and species; some maternal care, not much from dads, and lots of variation, with some mothers being inattentive.

Communication

• Marmots use chirps, whistles, and tail signals—no evidence for “words,” but they effectively communicate danger and risk to others.

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Notable Quotes

• On Sociality:
  "Turns out that many ways we're looking at sociality, the more social animals are, the less likely they are to survive. ... So there are some benefits of sociality, but we are also finding lots of costs of being too socially integrated with others."
  – Dr. Daniel Blumstein (42:37)

• On Fat Marmot Week:
  "I would launch a Fat Marmot Week. ... We're talking about starting a Fat Marmot Week."
  – Dr. Daniel Blumstein (34:04)

• On Career and Science:
  "I love my job. I have the best job in the world—getting funding for it."
  – Dr. Daniel Blumstein (74:35)

• On Following Your Inner Marmot:
  "Basically you have to follow your inner marmot. That's my advice."
  – Dr. Daniel Blumstein (77:12)

• On Marmot Chilling:
  "Picking up a living furry stone is not in the physics that I've been taught."
  – Dr. Daniel Blumstein (10:25)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |----------------------------------------|-----------| | Intro & Guest Intro | 00:00-04:18 | | Marmot Basics & Social Structure | 04:19-08:18 | | Hibernation & Physiology | 06:23-13:39 | | Plague, Predators, Fieldwork | 13:46-19:24 | | Groundhog Day, Cultural History | 19:26-26:15 | | Dr. Blumstein’s Field Journey | 26:16-28:25 | | Burrow Engineering & Safety | 29:19-32:00 | | Garden, Pest, and Pet Interactions | 64:05-62:44 | | Marmot Reproduction | 44:03-49:31 | | Endocrine Disrupting Pollutants | 49:34-54:44 | | Communication & Alarm Calls | 71:33-73:59 | | Listener Q&A Highlights | 39:09-73:31 | | Funding Science & Long-Term Studies | 74:35-76:14 | | Motivation & Joys of Marmotology | 77:12-78:06 |

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Memorable Moments

• Allie walks into the interview having spilled iced tea on herself (03:04)—setting a relaxed tone of authenticity and humor.
• Dr. Blumstein recounts the logistical puzzles and wild escapes in marmot captivity experiments (12:28).
• Listener Francesca describes a “commune” of groundhogs in Kentucky, leading to a discussion on marmot sociability and risks (39:21).
• Discussion of bizarre marmot festival scandals—dead groundhogs, open-casket funerals, and “drama in the marmot world” (24:58).
• A whimsical debate on how much wood a woodchuck could chuck gives way to scientific facts about marmot excavation (57:23).
• Dr. Blumstein’s life advice: “Follow your inner marmot.” (77:12)

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Conclusion

This episode illuminates groundhogs and their marmot kin—from their wild and sometimes scandalous behavioral ecology to their role in tradition, culture, and biomedical research. Dr. Blumstein’s deep knowledge and storytelling bring marmotology alive, offering listeners both practical answers and existential inspiration. Groundhogs may be grumpy, solitary, and prone to dramatic escapades, but by embracing their quirks, we learn more about the interconnectedness of life, science, and even our own place in the world.

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Further Resources

• Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (Dr. Blumstein’s charity of choice)
• Smologies: Kid-/classroom-safe versions of podcast episodes
• Papers, studies, and videos: Linked at alieward.com/ologies/marmotology

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"This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather."
– Dr. Daniel Blumstein (80:53)

Transcript

[Allie Ward]

Oh hey, it's the lady next to you at the salad bar covering up her iceberg lettuce with spring greens. Alie 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. They make it possible and you too can submit your questions before we record. And you can join patreon for a dollar a month at patreon.com ologies thank you to everyone out there in ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com and and for $0 you can support us just by leaving a review. And to prove that I read them all, here's one from the scheming rat who wrote this show is the best, not an opinion. P.S. if you hate the swears and stuff, guess what? They write in all caps. She made another podcast just for you. Go to smologies. Thank you the scheming rat for screaming that. And yes, we have devised a classroom safe version of Ologies. It's available in its own feed wherever you get podcasts. It's called smologies S M O L O G I E S all. Also, thank you to all the sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a cause of the ologist's choosing each week.

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[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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[Allie Ward]

Month when network is busy see terms 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 marmots and integrating that into conservation efforts to influence environmental policy. And on a rainy January day here in LA a few weeks ago, I got over to the university to lob some questions. But first, just got to ucla. I'm here to interview the groundhog expert. I got out of my car and I spilled 20 ounces of cold iced tea onto my crotch. It's so soaked for, like, it's not a little wet. It's soaked like I had hosed myself off. This is what happens when you do interviews in person. You really never know what you're gonna get. Hey, I'm Allie. You waiting for me?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Yep.

[Allie Ward]

Sorry about my pants. All right, we're already off to a memorable start, but clearly our ologist and the lovely Holly Ober in UCLA media relations, they were chill. They were down to clown. We went up to his office where he has all sorts of skulls and marmot art, even a roadkill groundhog that he and his wife Janice taxidermied themselves. And we chatted all about the rodent du jour, including how and why we celebrate Groundhog's Day. The Buddhism and paganism of the midwinter slump. Romantic advice you should not take from a marmot. What they are singing into the wind, how to coexist with one in your garden, why they don't get stressed about holiday binging. The real estate layout of a groundhog lair. What to do if you want 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 martologist Dr. Daniel Blumstein.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Dan Blumstein.

[Allie Ward]

He him. Right? Okay. This is news to me. As of about 15 minutes ago, a groundhog is a woodchuck.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

There are 15 species of marmots, okay? Groundhogs are one of those species. Another name for groundhogs are woodchucks.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Whistlepig is a common name for some marmots.

[Allie Ward]

Okay.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

People call yellow bellied marmots whistlepigs, but in general, woodchucks are the least social of the 15 species of marmots. 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 has shown that there's a little more sociality than most people think about when they look at woodchucks. But the other species are more social. So I study yellow bellied marmots, which are socially plastic. And what's really interesting about that is it allows us to understand the dynamics of, you know, what's good about being social? Not a lot of things for marmots. We can get into that. The rest of the species are much more social and the kids stick around for a couple of years and in some cases there's mothers are mating with sons to keep them around and alpine marmots, you know, you should not use marmots as a model for our behavior. There's all sorts of sordid stuff going down with marmots. You really want to know?

[Allie Ward]

I do. So a groundhog is a type of marmot?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Yes.

[Allie Ward]

Not all marmots are groundhogs. Correct. It's like cactus succulent.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Correct.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

They're all about cat size.

[Allie Ward]

Okay.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

The Himalayan marmot, Marmota himalayaniana 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 of the. I mean, they double their mass every year, right?

[Allie Ward]

Every year they double.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

They hibernate. Marmots are the biggest of the true hibernators. Bears don't hibernate, bears aestivate. Bears can't lose enough body heat to properly hibernate. So marmots lose their body heat. Not only that, we did a study where we borrowed animals from the wild, brought them back to the lab, hibernated them, put them back to the wild when we're done with them. And it turns out they actively suppress their metabolism and temperature, which is super interesting. Yellow bellied marmots are, are incredibly efficient hibernators. In big ones, at the end of the year are about 5 kilos, which is pretty big. That's a big cat. They burn when they're in deep torpor. A gram of fat a day.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Yeah. So basically, biomedical researchers study marmots 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 marmot. Maybe we should.

[Allie Ward]

Is it a difference between white fat and brown fat?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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 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 might think it's easy to study what an animal eats. It's actually really hard to study what an animal eats when you begin thinking about that. These guys are looking for specific fatty acids. So they eat plants, but plants aren't. Plants aren't plants. And different parts of the same plant and 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.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Well, I would say they're the king of rodents, but capybara are the kings of rodents. I love capybara, but marmots are the kings of the ground squirrels. So they're related to prairie dogs and ground squirrels. A little less related to tree squirrels. There are lots of species of ground squirrels around the Northern hemisphere and some in the Southern hemisphere. Prairie dogs are only in North America and marmots have a whole arctic distribution. They're found around the Northern Hemisphere but not in the Southern hemisphere.

[Allie Ward]

So heads up a marmot. In general, it's a big, huge ground squirrel that can weigh up to 15 pounds or 7 kilograms. It can be up to 2ft long, and there's about 15 or so species. They're among those. There are little guys, but overall they live mostly in North America and Eurasia. They're A bit dachshund. Like they have cute little legs, they have a furry little tail if you like charismatic rodents. Also, you can enjoy our scoridiology episode about squirrels and our capybara episode in which we discuss the Pope's decision to classify them as fish. And then what about groundhogs?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Groundhogs have a really interesting distribution. I think they go down into Georgia and they sort of go a swath across North America, 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 efficient hibernators. They lose weight really quickly, so they get really fat and they lose a lot of weight. And groundhogs are really cute because they have really big ears. You look at them like that's a groundhog.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

How low does their body temperature get?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

So there are ground squirrels, Arctic ground squirrels that can get their body temperature below zero Celsius below 32. They have antifreeze. Pretty cool.

[Allie Ward]

Is anyone studying groundhogs for like biomedical applications?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

People are doing nasty things to groundhogs to understand obesity and how you can be obese without having problems of obesity because they get obese every year. They double their mass. They have to put on fat and energy in order to not eat for seven or eight months. Marmots are kings of escape in captivity. So marmot meetings, you go and you hang out with all these people from all over the former Soviet Union, or the Soviet Union at the time, depending upon when you went. And one guy, and they were using him in Russia, Soviet Union, for bioweapons research, because they harbor some diseases, a lot of them have plague in Europe, but then they have other things as well. So this one guy was like, oh, yeah, my KGB colonel came to me one day and said, you know, if the marmots break out one more time, you will be fired. You know. So when we brought these into captivity to borrow them, to hibernate them, we put them in stainless steel welded rabbit cages. And the first thing they did was break the stainless steel 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.

[Allie Ward]

Well, the mattress is soft. How are they getting through steel?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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 marmots. Yeah. You know, and so marmots bite.

[Allie Ward]

Have you ever gotten stitches from a marmot?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

I've not gotten stitches, but I'm probably an error, what's probably viewed as an erroneous data point in some CDC database, if there is a CDC anymore, because I got bitten by a hibernating marmot because we had the power outage. I'm 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.

[Listener Francesca Huggins]

Oh.

[Allie Ward]

Do you have to worry about any in the us like plague or rabies or anything like that?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Wow.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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.

[Allie Ward]

Let's just take a quick, relaxing break from the horrors of the news cycle to learn about the plague. So marmots have fleas, and fleas can carry plague, which is an illness caused by a bacterium known as Yersinia pestis. It's named after pestilence and a 19th century French Swiss biologist named Alexandre Yersin. 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, a fever, chills, pneumonia, bulbous growths, and your extremities may turn blackish purple. And the Black Death, taking place in the mid-1300s, wiped out up to 50 million Europeans, or about half the continent's population. Thanks, fleas. It also took 500 years to figure out what bacterium was responsible. And our buddy Alexandra finally figured it out by, according to our other friend Wikipedia, obtaining specimens after bribing English sailors responsible for disposing of the bodies of plague victims, since the plague never really left us. So we have antibiotics though, but we don't always have answers such as why marmots, why? And one 2024 paper titled Different Characteristics of the soil in marmot habitats might be one of the factors influencing Yersinia pestis. So the preferred soil and the mineral content may make things ripe for fleas and plague, as is our increasingly Venus like atmosphere. And for more on that you can see the 2023 paper titled Climate driven marmot plague dynamics in Mongolia and China 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 microwave top pocket, but it's got more pure ingredients because we have a treatment for plague, but we don't really have treatments for ultra processed foods and microplastics. More on those later actually. But yes, while there may be more than one way to skin a groundhog, a lot of them might involve fleas looking for a new hot host like yourself. Also, if you love blood suckers, 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.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Prairie dogs in the plains where they study them, Black tailed prairie dogs in Colorado is they douse every trap with permethrin I think to sort of kill the fleas and they still get it.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Yeah.

[Allie Ward]

Do you take antibiotics?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Can you imagine just being like hi.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Honey, I came home with the plague.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

And Colorado and California and California, the best ologists.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

I'm not going in the skunkologist car.

[Allie Ward]

I know it's this poor Subaru Outback is probably choking its way down the road. But when it comes to your. Your fieldwork, has it taken you all over and has it taken you to Punxsutawney? Phil, have you been to groundhog celebrations?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

That's a sore point. I have not been to Punxsutawney.

[Allie Ward]

That's shocking.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

That's a good point.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

While it's cold, but with climate change, maybe I will go to Punxsutawney 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 marmots all around the Northern Hemisphere.

[Allie Ward]

What do you think of Groundhog Day?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

So for years, Dan's lab has hosted, of course, Groundhog Day parties at the university and at one point has been interviewed by the LA Times on how to celebrate it. He told one newspaper outlet that his soirees involve science geeks at his UCLA lab gathered to nibble, schmooze, and revel in groundhoggery in all its magnificent splendor. Okay, so what is happening in Groundhog's Day? They are hibernating. Are they in a burrow? Like, how deep are these groundhogs chilling out?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

So Groundhog Day. So, I mean, you know, culturally, we build holidays on previous holidays, and Groundhog Day is half the way between winter solstice and spring equinox. And the pagans had a holiday to sort of celebrate the coming of spring. And I guess in Northern Europe, they realized they're hibernators around there, and they were living close to hedgehogs, and hedgehogs hibernate. So they were using hedgehogs as this idea of predicting how long the rest of the winter would be. So when the Pennsylvania Deutsch, the Germans, came to Pittsburgh area, they were looking for an analogy, and they realized that woodchucks, groundhogs were hibernating, 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. Mm. And then winter will continue. If it's cloudy and the groundhog doesn't see a shadow, you know, then maybe the weather. Things are changing, and maybe spring will come early. Does it work? Does a coin flip work? Yeah, I mean, you know, get. Get the data. And by the way, there are competing groundhogs now. So Puxanifil has been taken over by we are Willie and all of these other groundhogs. Truth?

[Allie Ward]

Mm. Okay, so a rural town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is called Punxsutawney. And in this town, there's a place called Gobbler's Knob. And I'm watching as much heated rivalry as the rest of you, but trust me, this was actually just named for the presence of turkeys on a small knoll. But on Gobbler's Knob is a tree stump, and at the bottom of that tree stump is a small door. And locals and tens of thousands of tourists gather around February 2, starting around 3am or if they're properly socially lubricated. I hear that people just don't go to bed. And then at 7:20am on February 2, 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 gonna continue. And Punxsutawney Phil, although captive groundhogs can live past 14 years, is well over 100 years old because these top hatted locals meet with him in the summer, and they give him a sip of elixir of life, which makes him immortal. Now, what is actually happening, some scientists agree, is that they swap out the woodchuck when one dies. They've even used girl groundhogs, which in the wild would not be getting out of hibernation early because they're horny, but they deserve to have the job anyway. It's a high profile and respected position. But when the groundhog is not forecasting punks Athani Phil lives at the local library in a Plexiglas 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 end. 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, 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 wails from onlooking children. There's been hot gossip, too. Like Wiarton Willie, which was a white furred groundhog, was so rare, he was nearly irreplaceable. And officials kept his 2020 death under wraps for nearly two years. He was dead one year, and they tossed a hat out in the snow, never explaining why. And they later had to say, like, he's dead. He had a successor. And then in 2023, that successor, it's widely assumed, was responsible for infanticide of his own children who were found dead in their burrow.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

And.

[Allie Ward]

And then that was kept a secret for a while due to bad publicity. So Ontario's Wiarton Willie has left a legacy of scandal. It's rocked the marmot world and, you.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Oh, what did they find out?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

I mean, it died.

[Allie Ward]

Yeah, it died. What about Groundhog's Day? Bill Murray movies, Groundhog's Day, freezing their.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Butts off, waiting to worship a rat. Weatherman Phil Connors is spending the day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, reliving the same day over and over.

[Allie Ward]

Have you seen it more than once?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Of course I've seen it more than once.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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.

[Allie Ward]

It's not about groundhogs, just about the living life over and over again and.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

I used to get paid to bicycle around the world.

[Allie Ward]

How?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

I didn't get paid a lot. I mean, I had sponsors 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 do something international, maybe conservation Y but I also was really into behavior and I'm bicycling with an old girlfriend around. We tried to bicycle around India, Nepal, Pakistan. We tried to bicycle around the Himalayan Karakoram. China blocked our attempts at two places. We got into Nepal and couldn't get over. They wouldn't let us in. So we bicycled around the northern areas of Pakistan, the Karakoram. And so I get up to northern Pakistan and it's gorgeous. And I find myself on the border with China camping in a place called Clinterab National Park. And there are marmots everywhere and they're super social and there are foxes everywhere. There's snow leopards. 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 study these guys here. So I ended up looking at anti predator behavior and I was looking at anti 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 this super intact predator community with these beautiful marmots in an uninhabited meadow, you know, up at 14,300ft, you know, dying and getting very strong.

[Allie Ward]

Oh my God. Do you still bicycle a lot?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

No, I'm a. I'm a slug.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

I'm gonna start every morning with a martini.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

And maybe every evening.

[Allie Ward]

Yeah, just make it. Lower the bar, lower the bar, lower the bar.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

So we have pledged to absolutely ruin ourselves. But what about groundhog physique? Okay, talk to me a little bit about anatomy. Cause you mentioned that they have big ears. And for animals, animals that live in the cold, that's surprising to me. Would they lose a lot of heat?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Okay.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

But they are round and cute like a bear's, which also helps them conserve heat. And for more on how bears do not truly hibernate, you can see our ursinology episodes on bears or the thermophysiology episode with Dr. Shane Campbell Staton about body heat. And then how are groundhogs living? They're grumpy and they're solitary for the most part. Do they live in underground subway systems? Do they dig one burrow that they hang out in? Are they grabbing plants from the roots?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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 marmots persist. It's actually safety.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

You need to know that a groundhog burrow has a better layout than my house. There are ample winding hallways. They've got a toilet chamber complete with layers of grass, like an eco friendly composting toilet. There is a room for sleeping with a grass mattress, organic. Usually they got a nursery for the kiddos. They have a walk in pantry for food storage. At different times of the year, a groundhog may offer affordable housing to its neighbors like skunks or a writhing clot of garter snakes. There are booby traps in the form of dead end tunnels to fool predators who get disoriented like they're on the set of Severance. The front entrance of a burrow is a tidy mound of dirt swept out of their fine homes. This driveway they build also affords the groundhogs a little panoramic view to take in the sunset with a cocktail or keep an eye out for things that want to kill them. During their hibernation, males get up earlier than the females and then they go door to door hoping to bone. Or they get into tooth fights with other marmot hotties.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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. It's my happiest time of the year. And you know, we go where we know the marmots are hibernating and all it is is a blanket of snow. And then one day there might be a hole. And if we're really lucky, we know where the burrows are. Kind of. We're looking, looking, looking, looking, looking on the snow covered slope and suddenly a hole appears, a nose appears and a bunch of fleas fly out of the burrow.

[Allie Ward]

No.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

So sometimes they use different burrows after they emerge.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Okay.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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.

[Allie Ward]

Do they ever just run out of fuel hibernating?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Yeah. There's overwinter mortality is a huge source of mortality. Only 50% of marmot babies born in one year will be alive the next year and they emerge. And if it's a good year, if there's a lot of insulation in the snow and they have a good burrow and whatever, they come out and they're fat. I mean, they haven't lost a lot of weight over winter. But if it's still 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 the needs.

[Allie Ward]

Have you ever thought for publicity reasons to launch a Fat Groundhog Week?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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. But yes, we at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory where I work, we're talking about starting a Fat Marmot Week.

[Allie Ward]

I feel like you should. When would be peak time for that?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

September. But that's when we have to come back and teach, Right?

[Allie Ward]

Your dance card's a little full, right?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Yeah.

[Allie Ward]

You need to. Holly, you need to get a social media person on it. Just be like one person that wants to launch Fat Marmot Week. There must be someone. I have so many questions from listeners. Can I ask them?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Sure.

[Allie Ward]

Okay. And I will ask them, but not before a quick break. For sponsors of the show who make it possible to donate to a cause of the ologist's 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 system 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. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. So is my entire life. I've used Squarespace ever since I started this podcast. So whether you're just starting out or you are scaling your business, Squarespace is an all in one website platform. It's designed to help your business stand out and succeed. They give you everything you need to offer your services to get paid all in one place. Whether you're doing things like consultations or events, you can show the world what you do with this great customizable website. It's designed to help grow your business. You can get paid on time. I love that they have on brand invoices, they have online payment. All of the things that you are overwhelmed to do Squarespace can handle. You can also streamline your workflow. They have built in appointment scheduling and email marketing tools which are huge right now. Again, I love Squarespace. Whether you are starting from the ground up and you just need a simple website or if you're a business and you want better, more streamlined portals. Squarespace. They know I love them. You know I love them. So head to squarespace.com ologies for a free trial and win. When you're ready to launch, use the offer code ologies to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. Go do it. Oh hey, holidays are over. Frankly, I'm happy about it. It's been an nutritionally imperfect time of year, but we're back and I'm excited about being a little healthier. Ritual has been in my routine and my stomach for years. They have evidence based essential multivitamins which have key ingredients that are often missed in the average read my diet. They're high quality in a form your body can actually use and they're designed to be gentle on the stomach for a long time. I took Ritual in the morning along with some other medication, but I've started taking it at night recently partly by accident and then I realized when I take it at night, have an easier time getting up in the morning. I think B vitamins are just something that helps me with energy. I literally have a bottle in my bedside table. I also love that Ritual's products are vegan. They're well tested for heavy metals and allergens. It's a female, founded B Corp and instead of striving for perfect health, aim for supporting foundational health for a limited time save 40% on your first month at ritual.comologies that's ritual.comologies for 40% off your first month. These statements have now been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. We have to say that if you.

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[Allie Ward]

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

[Listener Francesca Huggins]

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 6ft 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.

[Allie Ward]

Are they living in condos of 22 groundhogs?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

So groundhogs are not that social.

[Allie Ward]

Okay.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

They get makeovers internally every year. Right. They kind of. They're reborn, and then they go back into. I feel like there's Buddhism in that too. Right.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

If you've been feeling off lately. One of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths is what's called dukkha, which stems from a root meaning a loose axle on a cart or having a bumpy ride. And dukkha means pain or suffering or just general unease, maybe seeking something that won't last, like a dopamine hit. We all know about that. Some say that loneliness is a form of dukkha. And in 2023, US Health and Human Services issued a report titled Our epidemic of Loneliness. And it noted that loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling. It harms both individual and societal health. It's associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. It continues, the mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day and even greater than that associated with physical inactivity. So for human organisms such as yourself.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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. 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 are also finding lots of costs of being too socially integrated with others.

[Allie Ward]

What does that do?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

What's that do?

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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, haven't been able to get funded for that. That if you're social and you stick around and don't disperse, you're likely to be reproductively suppressed. That nice girls finish last if you're a marmot. And that as you get older, you get crotchetier and you get more successful. So don't follow that advice either. Don't be a marmot.

[Allie Ward]

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?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Pups.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Right? Right.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

There is reproductive suppression, whereas mothers are preventing younger daughters from reproducing. So a lot of the things we're studying in the yellow bellied marmots are that sociality isn't necessarily good, but they're sort of forced into it in terms of mating. Sometimes there are multi male groups and in multi male groups, pretty much everything happens. We have one male defending all of the females and mating with all of them. We have one male defending subsets, males defending subsets of females and mating with them. And then we have mixed paternity.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Mixed paternity is not uncommon in mammals. So we can have that in yellow bellied. The other thing that the most successful males. Males typically have a 10 year of about two years. The most successful males, the whole idea called reproductive skew, and reproductive skew is 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.

[Allie Ward]

Oh, no, don't try that at home. So then does that lead to a lot of birth?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

There is inbreeding that we can detect and it's not good for them. But from a female's perspective, if there's only one male around, she has no choice.

[Allie Ward]

Better to do a Greek tragedy of some sort.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Most of them make it, some don't. So something's better than nothing in the game of fitness. My favorite couple, midblot, I think he lived to 11 and he was this old, gray, grizzled guy. I watched him emerge one April. We had a blizzard. And that was his last year. I never saw him after the blizzard and he was stiff and whatever, but for a number of years. And he was one of the most successful males we've ever had. And he used to have a whole section of the valley. And by the end of his life, he had 1399, this grumpy female and his daughter. He was a sweetheart. Some males are just like, rough and whatever. He would go up and greet her and she would smack him in the face.

[Allie Ward]

And.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

And, you know, then he would, like, go and chase his daughter because he could. But, you know, it was just. It's a Greek tragedy. I don't know. Tragedy. Absolutely. From his perspective.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Anal genital distance.

[Allie Ward]

No, wait. Anal genital instance.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Analogenital distance.

[Allie Ward]

Okay, tell me about that.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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.

[Allie Ward]

Oh, no.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

So it turns out that if you're a mammal, if you're a male, you have a penis and an anus, and those are a distance away. If you're a female, you have a vagina and an anus, and those are closer to each other. So people, maybe people like me, measure something called anogenital distance. Now, it also turns out that if you're a rodent, you have lots of siblings. And you can imagine all the babies in the uterus. Two uteri, like a pea. And then the pea pods are the babies growing up. And a guy named Frederick Vomsal was looking at the development, the effect of hormones on development. And with mice, mice did little caesarean sections and figured out where the babies came from in their uterine horn, in their uterus. And females surrounded by two males became more masculinized. So it also turns out if you're a mammal, you start off feminized and have to be defeminized. And you get defeminized by having little bursts of testosterone when you're in utero that begin sexual differentiation. So he found that natural variation in the location you were in that pea pod influenced what you were exposed to your siblings around you. The testosterone leaked through and females became more masculinized. The distance between their vagina and their anus increased. I mean, you can try this at home and measure people if you want.

[Allie Ward]

But, you know, grundle studies.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

So we didn't know. We are not doing caesareans on these marmots. We study them in the wild. But a former postdoc, Raquel Monkless, said, well, you're measuring it in genitals. I go, yes. She's like, I want to sort of start analyzing this data set. I'm like, yes. And what we discovered is that we could look at emergence sex ratio. So we don't know. Marmots are born, they probably live about 28 days in the burrow and are nursing. And then they emerge after about 28, 30 days, and they're More or less weaned and we don't know who died in the burrow and we don't know who was absorbed and reabsorbed. So the Russians who've studied all these marmots have found all sorts of really interesting reabsorption of embryos. So there's all sorts of maternal control over what's going on.

[Allie Ward]

So yes, mammal embryonic anatomy starts out female and then it defemails. And many female mammals have more reproductive options than humans. In some countries in any event we.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Catch 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 2 year olds. So here is natural variation in hormones. We had some people from Berkeley, some toxicology lab who used to work at Rumble said oh yeah, send me some marmot blood. They send me 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. Phthalates, which are found to make plastics 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 and we see natural variation having such profound effects on later behavior, survival, et cetera, reproductive success. You should be scared about what we're putting in the environment and what this is doing for this follow your inner marmot. Marmots are sentinels of our health and.

[Allie Ward]

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.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Yeah. How is their blood so clean?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

We're all half plastic.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Shouldn'T read so much. It's a really scary world out there.

[Allie Ward]

So hormonal factors can impact behavioral changes and preferences. And we have an excellent neuroendocrinology episode all about that. We'll link for you. And keep in mind in these cases with marmots, this is with some of the cleanest plastic free blood scientists have come across. So given the known endocrine disruption caused by environmental toxins, you can see our environmental toxicology episode. It's anyone's guess how animals 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, 2026, 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 traps? And then you go from that.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Like how we spend an inordinate amount of time sitting looking for things. And we spend a lot of time just sitting and watching animals. We spend over 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 ridge top and see like eight social groups in this meadow because there's like no vegetation. It was the most amazing place to watch marmots. And aside from being hypoxic all the.

[Allie Ward]

Time, I was going to say you need oxygen and SPF for that.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

A lot of spf, yeah.

[Allie Ward]

Do you have an SPF that you recommend?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

The more the merrier. And use physical blockage.

[Allie Ward]

Okay. So like you're working with hats, you're working with.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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.

[Allie Ward]

Right. I know it's that I'm at that age too where I'm like, they're gonna have to start getting a melon baller out. You can also see our melanology episode for more on sun exposure and how and why your body makes pigments. Okay. Mel Sarah, Magda Kawasaka, Spencer Hoytaway, Protect trans lives. Andrea Marie, Squirrel Tree, Ruggiero, 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 wood could a woodchuck chuck? Woodchuck could chuck wood. Do they chuck wood? I have.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

I don't even know what chucking wood is.

[Allie Ward]

Okay, thanks. Because neither do I.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Do you know what chucking wood is?

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

They're not beavers.

[Allie Ward]

I know, but then I'm wondering, do they. Are they chucking, like, throwing it? Maybe. I don't.

[Listener Francesca Huggins]

Yeah.

[Allie Ward]

You think it's throwing it?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

They don't throw wood.

[Allie Ward]

Okay, so then they. 0 is if they could chuck, though.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

I mean, I wonder if that would help.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

How much wood would you like to chuck?

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

But beavers are the lumberjacks of nature.

[Allie Ward]

All right, put the calculators away, nerds. Somebody already crunched the numbers for us. So in 1988, Richard Thomas, a wildlife biologist from upstate New York, figured this out. So, first off, no whistle. Pigs are tossing wood around, okay? But they are little excavating machines. And if they woke up on the right side of the bed, had a big 711 coffee, they can toss up to 35 cubic feet or like 10 cubic meters of dirt in a day, which weighs in at around 700 pounds or 320 kilograms in a day. 700 pounds. So do not waste natural resources by riddling chatgpt with this one. Also, legend has it, if you were to ask Siri, she would say, well, since a woodchuck is really a groundhog, the correct question would be, how many pounds in a groundhog's mound When a groundhog pounds hog mound, which is £700 more wood than you can shake a stick at. Alexis Culley, 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?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Doesn't everyone like to chase a squirrel?

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

He doesn't hurt the marmots, I think, as long as there's not taking 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.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

I love porcupines.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

You know, I walked in here with doused pants.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

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?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Just a disclaimer. So, yes, if you want to have a woodchuck roommate, only certified wildlife Rehabbers need apply. Same with possums and squirrels and raccoons. And yes, we have an episode for each of those critters. Also, as I edited this episode in my home that would be substandard for a groundhog, I had a fuzzy lump of woodchuck sized potty trained doggie snoring on my lap. So just like get a dog or a cat. Just get one of those instead. And for more on those, we have a recent episode on ethno sinology, all about how dogs evolved from wolves. And of course we have a felineology 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 Ertman and Brianna Elle 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?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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?

[Allie Ward]

Yes, yes.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

You could just mountain lion poop.

[Allie Ward]

Mountain lion poop. Okay.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

And pee.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Years ago, so this was in the former Soviet Union and they were in Kazakhstan or something and there was a nuclear facility they were trying to marmot proof. And it's like, how deep does a fence have to go in order to. And how high does it have to go? Like, I don't know. They can dig deep if they want, but it sort of depends. And, 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 Florant, he's kept marmots before and he's Looking at the fence and he knows snow and he's like, these marmots are going to emerge through a couple meters of snow in the spring and that fence isn't tall enough.

[Allie Ward]

Oh no.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

It's like Jurassic park but with marmots kind of.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

But I don't think marmots are not velociraptors.

[Allie Ward]

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 marmots, you will be disappointed. Another review written in French was titled Scandeleur, 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 marmots. I understand that Washington's Mount Rainier is a prime destination. One social media post I saw explained that at Mount Rainier I heard the sound of a little girl screaming. I ran to save the little girl. It was a marmot. Of course they write, but don't terrorize them. Just keep a distance, use a long lens. Don't give them any reason to shriek in your presence. Let's keep it chill, but okay. Speaking of teeth, I was thinking like, we have gopher cages over some of our native plants because we're like, we would sometimes see patches of poppies getting just like a bouquet snatched underground. So we're a constant war with our gophers. I'm curious, you mentioned that they can chew through stainless steel, which is absolutely insane to me, but like you could.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

So, you know, I study animal behavior and I'm really interested in human wildlife interactions and what we perceive as conflicts. And, you know, if you can redefine what a conflict is, that's the best thing, Right? If you really want to grow vegetables there, you're going to declare war. And, you know, there, the general thing is you make it harder for them to get to something and you make it easy there for them to get to others. So maybe you have some sacrificial, you know, tulips or tubers for them. They don't need tubers, but I mean, you know, whatever for them to eat and that might be good. And then you protect other stuff with fencing and you can fence them out the same way you can fence drl.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Maybe they eat tubers, but I mean.

[Allie Ward]

Maybe they do, but in general. Victoria Chapin, Madeline Fox, Sarah vanderkleed, Sarah E. G. And Shannon Dermody want to know, yeah, what kind of things do they eat? Shannon wanted to know, do they eat bird eggs, like grassland bird eggs?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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. In these more social species, the most social species, there's bad stuff that happens. So males will come in and kill all the babies 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. Females not so sure. But the golden marmots I studied in Pakistan, infanticide was as important as predation for first summer mortality.

[Sponsor Voice]

Wow.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Yeah, I mean, marmots are soap operas.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

So since we're talking about Zen type statements, my insight after a lot of study was marmots are where they've been. Okay, just focus on that, find your inner eye. Marmots are where they have been. There are good areas and bad areas and there's intergenerational transfer of these burrows. So 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.

[Allie Ward]

Do they have tails?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Of course they have tails.

[Allie Ward]

What kind of tails do they have?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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 marmot, the golden marmots, I studied subspecies of the long tailed marmots really use their tails a lot.

[Allie Ward]

What about groundhogs?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Groundhogs have tails, they use their tails.

[Allie Ward]

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. Stratweg wanted to know. I'd like to hear the whistle of a whistle pig and why this usually solitary creature vocalizes. How are they communicating? Is it chirps and whistles? Is it tails?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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 they 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, marmots are a great system to study the evolution of this. And I wrote a postdoc proposal and got funded to go around the world and continue studying marmot screams and whistles and chirps and whatever. So the first thing you should realize is don't believe anything you read because I was unable to find any strong evidence. They have word like communication. They communicate risk a variety of different ways which are super cool. Some call more, some call faster. But it's not as though they have one type of whistle or chirp for an aerial predator and one type for a terrestrial predator, as do vervet monkeys. Vervet monkeys are pretty cool. As do chickens, as do a lot of some species. Not all. Some primates, not all primates have word like communication for different sorts of predators. They may label them, but they communicate a lot of different risk a lot of different ways. The Vancouver island marmot almost went extinct. Down to less than 50 in captivity. Now up to about 300 and something, 400 something in the wild. 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.

[Allie Ward]

No.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Was it habitat loss? Was it hunting? What did it?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

A combination of high alpine logging which so they only live on Vancouver Island. Heil pine logging seemingly brought them down suboptimal habitat and associated with the logging roads. Vancouver island has a remarkably rich wolf and cougar population and the cougars and wolves were eating them and they would go along the logging trails eat them. So it was a bad scene and.

[Allie Ward]

Their alarm calls did not save them from wolves or loggers.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Oh, loose lips sink ships.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Loose lips sink ships.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Myth about it that they chuck wood.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

I love my job. I have the best job in the World getting funding for it.

[Allie Ward]

Getting funding.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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.

[Allie Ward]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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.

[Allie Ward]

Even when you're at a place like ucla, like a, a top school.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Well, it shouldn't matter the school you're at.

[Allie Ward]

Yeah.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Yeah.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

And I feel really obligated to keep it going because my colleague and late friend Ken Armit just started this thing. It's the second longest study of individually marked mammals in the world. 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 epochs of selection and marmots are one of these really good long term studies.

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

We're going to start with Fat Marmot week.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Fat Marmot week.

[Allie Ward]

That's the entree into it. Get some billionaires have a pet project is I guess what we all that's our only hope as 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 at the top of alpine summit.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

Oh, how small are they?

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

They fit in your hand.

[Listener Francesca Huggins]

Oh, teensy.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

You sort of grip them like a.

[Allie Ward]

Baby rabbit kind of.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Yeah, a little longer.

[Allie Ward]

Oh my gosh.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Sometimes smaller.

[Allie Ward]

Oh my gosh. I want to see a pup irl.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

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

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

Marmots are cool.

[Allie Ward]

So ask groundhog people groundbreakingly not smart questions because they have dug up the research, they have the answers. Thank you so much to Dr. Blumstein for being on hand to open your office to the curiosities of me and Our listeners via patreon.com Ologies you too can join for as little as a dollar a month and submit questions. You can find out more about Dan and his lab at the link in the show notes. We'll also link to his charity of choice as well as our [e-mail] Ologies Marmotology, which will have so many links to studies and videos of groundhogs eating fruit. We're logies on bluesky and Instagram. I'm alieward on both. You can get merch via ologiesmerch.com we have shorter kids safe classroom, safe versions of Ologies called Smologies S M O L O G I E S you can subscribe to for free wherever you get. Podcasts Erin Talbert Admins Theologies Podcast Facebook group Avileen Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly R. Dwyer does the website. Nudging me out of hibernation and into the studio is scheduling producer Noelle Dilworth. Our top hatted MC is manager, managing director Susan Hale and the audio experts putting my pig whistles together are Jake Chaffee as director and lead editor, Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn squeaked us the theme music. And if you stick around to the very end of the show, I tell you a secret. I burden you with that. And this week, first off, the transcription software that we use cannot spell marmots. It either corrected it to Marmite or Mormons, which was particularly unsavory when writing about the mating and the 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 ten bucks her way for her nonprofit Skype, a scientist, which is doing great work. One of the things I got her is a perfume that is based on the volatile organic compounds in squid ink. So I'm excited to take a whiff, I think. Okay, gather your friends for Groundhog Day because it's midwinter isolation and phone addiction caused by billionaire media conglomerates are killing us. So put on mittens, eat some veggies, stare at each other's shadows instead. Southern Hemisphere Remember Sunscreen. Okay, bye bye. Pachydermatology, Homeology, Cryptozoology, Lithology, Nanotechnology, Meteorology, Mold Factology, Maplology, Serology.

[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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

[Allie Ward]

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[Dr. Daniel Blumstein]

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