My first marmot season and memorable marmots

Hi everyone!

I’m Svenja Kroeger, a PhD student from the University of Aberdeen (UK, Scotland) under supervision of Dr. Julien Martin and Prof. Jane Reid. I study senescence in yellow-bellied marmots and over the summer I spent three months at RMBL to help with the data collection for this long-term study. I’ve had an awesome time observing and trapping these adorable creatures and I’m looking forward to spending some time with them next year too!

 Over the last months I’ve grown really fond of a lot of the animals that I’ve been observing, so I’d like to not only introduce myself but also a couple of memorable marmots that I’ve encountered during my time here. In the picture above I’m holding the sweetest and smallest pup I’ve ever had the joy of getting my hands on: ‘Ghost’ - a tiny lady, weighing a mere 250 grams when she first emerged. Her name stems from the fur mark on her back, which resembles the ghost in ‘pacman’.

Another marmot that has definitely conquered my heart is this handsome guy in the picture below, a sturdy male by the name of ‘Dandelion’ (aka ‘Dandy’). In fact he is the first marmot I ever named! I’ve spent a lot of time watching him as he is fairly comfortable with people nearby. Also, he’s sort of ‘the man’ in Gothic town at the moment and as his name suggests he LOVES dandelions! I can’t wait to see him again next year!

Pup season

Hi everyone!

My name is Holly, and I'm an undergraduate member of Team Marmot! I've been at RMBL since mid-June and have seen a lot of pup emergences this season. Despite smaller populations of reproductively mature animals, we've had quite a bit of pup action. Down Valley alone had only 2 adult males and 6 adult females, yet they produced 30 pups. In one colony, there were 21 pups among 1 male and 4 females!! 

I've found it interesting how the different marmots behave in the traps. One female, forbidden sign, got trapped with 3 of her pups one time, despite truly disliking the handling process. We catch her almost every trapping session, but she always struggles when we are handling her. Separately, musical note was seen protecting her pup birthday cake when they got trapped together (see adorable picture below). I'm also fascinated by how similar some pups are to their mothers. Some have very similar faces, while others seem to inherit their mother's feistiness when trapped. Pup season was huge this year, but now that we've caught them all, all that's left is to watch them molt and remark them for hibernation!

Where are they?

Over the past decade or so, we usually have our first litters of pups emerge from below ground the last week of June. By July 4th, we're up to our ears in pups.

Photo by Amanda Lea of a pup, June 2010

This year, in which the marmots had a VERY late start, continues to be an exceptional (and not in a good way!) year. Our first litter emerged after 4 July and we're still looking for another one! In the past decade we've had as many as 187 pups to catch at emergence. But this year, with some luck, we hope to have as many as 14 litters but that depends on a lot--the mothers not reabsorbing their embryos because they were in poor body condition after the long winter, and predators like weasels not killing the pups before they emerge.

Another real issue is that we have been seeing a lot of adult females not breeding. Why? Well, as they say, a shortage of good men. Some groups had all the male marmots die and there was nobody to mate with at the end of a long winter. Interestingly, the first litter to emerge was one where the male hibernated with two adult females...they didn't have to emerge through 3 meters of snow to mate (they lived in an avalanche corridor and Julien was watching them earlier in the year as an avalanche approached them...they ducked out of the way!).

I'm sure we'll have more pups soon, but the wait is killing me. I'm concerned that the whole valley will pop at the same time (typically the lower elevation sites emerge about a week or so before the upper elevation sites emerge)...which will create some challenges to trap them all at emergence.

Ahh, life in the mountains...unpredictable yet still exciting.

Welcome to motherhood: Pups are here!

The pups have emerged! Dan discovered our first litter yesterday and our good neighbor, Elizabeth Overholser, joined us at this exciting scene to photograph us in action. In the photo below, I am holding "my" first pup, looking like a bit of a nervous Nelly with a newborn in my hand!

Jenn handling her first pup, very carefully!

More photos will surely be posted soon as we continue to weigh and mark these newly recruited members of our marmot population here at RMBL. We have already seen at least six pups and we expect to see more in days to come. Let the fun begin!

Meet Team Marmot: Yvonne Chi

Hi, my name is Yvonne, and I am a graduating senior majoring in Biology and Political Science. I am also a huge marmot fan!

Yvonne holding the marmot pup Square-Line-Square at Gray's Cabin in South Gothic, Colorado.

In March 2010, when Dan recruited me to join the ranks of the marmoteers at RMBL, I only had a vague idea of what marmots are… something along the lines of giant hibernating rodents who eat a lot.

As I found out, some marmots are giant indeed! Over the course of the summer, I engaged in my share of wrestling matches with 5-kilogram adult male marmots who were less than thrilled about being “bagged and tagged” and would writhe and scuffle and chomp down at any human body part within range of their formidable buck teeth.

I also observed medium-sized marmots (yearlings), watching them through my binoculars or spotting scope and recording their play as they chased each other across the spectacularly scenic river valley landscape.

There were also tiny marmots, fuzzy pups that warmed hands and hearts on the wet, chilly mornings of the mountains. Newly emerged pups weighed less than 500 grams; they could be cupped in one hand and were exceedingly photogenic!

The marmot pup Six Dice Dots after being tagged at River Cliff.

Forget cats and dogs; I’m a marmot person. I plan to work with the Blumstein Lab during my next two quarters on an honors thesis about marmot alarm calls. I am extremely excited to be, once again, in the company of those who gave me an incredible summer filled with epic adventures, breathtaking beauty, and the most awesome animals!

Meet Team Marmot: Dan Blumstein trapping pups

These days my role as a marmot researcher has changed. Whereas I used to spend most days collecting data in the field, I now spend a lot of time teaching others how to work with the marmots, conduct experiments, and I spend a lot of time troubleshooting new procedures, and a lot of time working with students showing them how to analyze data. An exception to this supervisory role is that when it’s pup season, all hands are required to quickly catch and mark pups before they become fox food!

Trapping pups is fun and quite a challenge at times. It’s fun because they’re very cute and you can hold them (we keep adults in our handling bags to avoid getting bitten by them). It’s a challenge because in recent years around the Gothic Townsite, it really has become a race against the foxes!

We set traps outside the marmot burrows and wait for the marmots to walk in but the foxes set up shop outside marmot burrows too. And they are amazingly effective predators! Foxes hunt by sitting quietly and waiting for a pup to emerge then, with an explosion of speed, they pounce on the pup, bite its neck and head, and kills it immediately. We’ve watched (we try not to interfere) entire marmot litters get killed and hauled off by adults to feed their fox kits within a few days of when the marmot litter has emerged.

The sad thing is that some of the foxes are present around the Gothic Townsite largely because of human activities. Foxes, but not coyotes, can habituate—get used to human activity. Indeed, coyotes will kill foxes—an interesting phenomenon called ‘intra-guild predation’. A few years ago some winter caretakers fed the foxes and this led to the foxes sticking around, habituating to people, and allowing them to learn to specialize on marmot pups. I wrote an essay for the Denver Post about how the kindness of some can cause localized ecological disasters.

For us, it just means a lot more effort into trapping pups immediately after they emerge. Which is a good thing for our long-term studies.