GOTHIC, Colo. — Last winter was tough for marmots living high in the Colorado mountains, where researchers say two-thirds of one population died while hibernating because of insufficient snow cover.
Those that survived are doing well, fattening up in time not just for fall and hibernation season but … drumroll, please … the very first Fat Marmot Week.
Just like Fat Bear Week, an online contest to vote for Alaskan brown bears plumped up for winter, Fat Marmot Week – beginning Monday – is mostly just for fun, but it also has a serious side: Scientists need to drum up donations for their long-running research into the rodents to keep it going through federal funding cuts.
“In some sense, we’re going to be laughing our way down as the Titanic sinks,” said Dan Blumstein, leader of the project launched decades ago at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. “Because what else are you going to do?”
But wait. What’s a marmot?
A marmot is a cat-sized, furry ground squirrel that lives in burrows in North America, Europe and Asia. The 15 or so species worldwide include groundhogs, which have their own special day, Feb. 2, in the U.S. and Canada.
In the Rocky Mountains, yellow-bellied marmots are plentiful. Hikers often spot these charismatic creatures perched on boulders or scurrying through wildflowers.
Marmots aren’t shy near trails popular with people. Watch out: A bold one might swipe your snack.
Like people, marmots have personalities and are “flexibly social,” meaning some like to intermingle in colonies of up to 30 animals while others prefer solitude, according to Emily Renkey, a master’s program student at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“We kind of understand these marmots just by looking at them sometimes, because we can kind of tell who’s who just by how they behave and how they interact with one another,” said Katie Adler, a UCLA doctoral student.
Some marmots are difficult to study because they are wary of researchers’ efforts to trap them using wire boxes baited with an enticing mixture of oats and peanut butter, Renkey said.
“Others, you could trap three or four times in the same morning,” she said.
Marmots are big-time snoozers
While hibernating bears snooze in a state called torpor, allowing them to wake up – or be woken up – every now and then, marmots slip into a far deeper form of hibernation. Their body temperature drops from about that of a human to as low as 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), not much warmer than their burrows in winter.
“You pick up a hibernating marmot and it’s this fuzzy ball and it feels like a cold rock with fur. It’s completely surreal,” Blumstein said. “They breathe once a minute or two.”
To prepare for winter, the animals do a tremendous amount of fattening. They double their weight to as much as 13 pounds (6 kilograms), then lose all of that bulk during half a year or more of hibernation.
“Marmots come out of the ground really skinny, relative to what they look like now, at least,” Adler said.
A poor snowpack affects more than the ski season
Last winter, scant snowfall and warm temperatures due to global warming deprived many Colorado marmots of an insulating blanket of snow over their burrows. Researchers believe their hibernation quarters got too chilly, causing many to die of cold.
“We had over 160 animals and we ended with 60 at the start of this season,” Blumstein said. “Most of them died because of the lack of snow cover.”
This year’s snowpack was the worst on record in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which includes Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. Human-caused climate change made the snow drought about 14 times more likely, a new study confirms.
Hundreds of researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory have observed changes including fewer bees and other pollinators, and sagebrush encroaching in valleys once dominated by wildflowers.
Precipitation changes, meanwhile, literally cascade downstream to where farmers and communities need water to survive.
“The snowmelt here impacts the Colorado River which impacts our drinking water,” Renkey said. “What happens in these mountains doesn’t stay in these mountains. It impacts all of us.”
Mouseketeers, musketeers and marmoteers
The study in Gothic, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Aspen, is run by researchers from UCLA and the University of Ottawa in Ontario. It was launched in 1962, making it one of the world’s longest-running studies of individual mammals.
The marmot researchers affectionately call themselves “marmoteers.”
“It allows graduate students and other people to come in and suddenly capitalize on this knowledge and ask questions. Without doing all the grunt work,” Blumstein said.
Funding cuts have caused Blumstein’s UCLA department to lose one-third of its graduate students. Fat Marmot Week is one approach to attract interest – and hopefully donations – to keep the work going. Among the rodents on display: Stonehenge, who chirps at mountain bikers; and Citroen, whose mate is a leader of this matriarchal marmot motherland. Voting opens Monday.
The researchers have also been posting marmot videos to the OnlyFans adult content platform. To capitalize on the attention those posts have garnered, a “super fan” created a meme coin, a type of cryptocurrency, called $OnlyMarms, and donates transaction fees to the research program. That alone has raised around $100,000.
The team needs to bank three years of funding – over $200,000 – to ensure marmot research can continue next summer.
“People have to find funding in ways that we’ve never really thought of before,” Adler said. “Like reaching out to the broader community to get people engaged.”
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