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!

Meet Tiffany

Hi everyone!

I'm Tiffany Armenta, a new-ish graduate student in the Blumstein lab.

I've been at RMBL since mid-April and absolutely love it here. I've done fieldwork in the past but have never been at a field site for such a long time, so this has allowed me to become completely immersed in my work. Plus, the hiking and biking opportunities around here are exceptional :)

In addition to the standard observations and samples we collect when trapping, I am stabilizing RNA from the marmots in order to look at genes expressed in their blood. I aim to compare the expression profiles of different phenotypes in order to see how environmental conditions can affect the genetics of individuals and, in turn, how these profiles may alter an animal's physiology.

For instance, I think it will be interesting to compare marmots that consistently exhibit signs of high vs. low stress (based on behavioral and physiological data). Studies of other (mostly model) organisms show over-expression of anti-inflammatory genes and under-expression of anti-viral genes in stressed individuals so it will be interesting to see if these patterns persist in a natural population.

I am also interested in the underlying mechanisms that occur when an individual prepares to disperse, so I focused on collecting RNA from our yearling marmots this summer. These guys will likely be exposed to new pathogens during this journey and will travel much further than they ever have in their entire life, so I expect dispersers to show a different pattern when it comes to metabolic and immunological genes.

In order to do this, I have to first build the marmot transcriptome, which is basically just the transcribed regions of the species' genome. This may not look like anything special, but it took me months of quality control and program queries to get this figure, which shows RNA sequence data that aligns to the 13-lined ground squirrel genome.

 

The lowest window here represents the squirrel genomic sequence: exons are blue blocks and introns are the lines with arrowheads. The large middle window displays marmot sequence (from one individual) that aligns to the squirrel genome, with each line representing a unique expression of that sequence.

Note that the majority of the marmot sequences (small gray squares) align with the squirrel exons. This was the highlight of my week because RNA should only be exonic sequences, so this means I've done something right! Success!

The next step is to identify the genes being expressed based on homology in other organisms (such as the squirrel and mouse) and then to quantify expression values. So expect to hear more from me once I make another breakthrough...

Meet Team Marmot: Mega and Lawrance

Hello fellow marmot lovers, field biologists, and any other souls out there. We are among the newest additions to Team Marmot.

My name is Mega Patel (pronounced just like it sounds) and I am a second year Biochemistry major at UCLA. I joined Team Marmot because I love all branches of the sciences, and the Blumstein lab seemed like a great place to expand my knowledge on science outside of chemistry. And my name is Lawrance Chung, a third year Biology major at UCLA. I decided to join Team Marmot because I secretly want to be a marmot. Joke aside, I felt that this lab would be a wonderful opportunity to expand my research experience.

Sorting the poop!

Since September 2011, we have been a part of the Blumstein lab. For the first few weeks we did some of the dirtier work, but we know that the resulting data is worth it. We sorted through fecal samples, from the RMBL group, the tagged wild marmots in Colorado, and the captive group, a control group housed at Colorado State University by Greg Florant from which experimental validations of our assays were carried out. Our work is done directly under the mentorship of Dr. Jennifer Smith (shown below).

Jennifer Smith with a captive marmot at
Colorado State University

The purpose of sorting these fecal samples was to get an accurate measurement on how stressed each particular marmot is on a day-to-day basis. While hair samples can provide an idea of how stressed one was months ago, and blood can be used to measure how stressed a particular individual is within a matter of minutes (reflecting trap stress), fecal samples can actually measure how stressed the marmots were yesterday (before the trapping event), which is exactly the kind of data this lab wants to add to its database.

Greg Florant with a captive marmot at

Colorado State University

Like you might have already guessed, we measure the “stress” level of marmots by measuring the concentration of glucocorticoids in their processed fecal samples. The process begins by sort through the fecal sample to obtain a pure sample. This means removing the different fibers, seeds, and occasionally rocks from the sample after creating a nicely mixed bag of feces that we fondly liked to call poo-dough. Then after a single sample was cleaned,it was carefully weighed to 0.20 grams. The accuracy of the weight was very important and we took great care in measuring the samples as close to 0.20grams each as we could. This precision was necessary so that the resulting concentrations of the glucocorticoids could be compared among different marmots. A larger weight could mean a higher concentration, causing the data to reflect the marmot being more stressed than it actually was. In addition, each marmot sample was carefully labeled with an unique ID to ensure that samples from different marmots were not mixed.

Currently we are sorting through and labeling blood and plasma samples from different marmots dating as far back as 2002 and have been preserved in a -80 ˚C freezer. The sorting process involves going through and individually labeling each vial with a unique ID. This sounds much easier than it is because we have to first be able to match up the vial to the correct entry in our database, which does not always happen as sometimes the dates or time will be off. Then comes the tricky part of trying to write on a frozen vial, however, with the help of Emery and Rachel, we have made great progress and will be done within the first week of next quarter.

It has definitely been a wonderful quarter with Team Marmot and we look forward to the next one! Happy Holidays everyone!

Team Marmot: End of the Summer Potluck

To celebrate the accomplishments of the day and the summer overall, all we went to Dan's cabin, the "Marmotage," for dinner.


Fun (and LOTS of food) was had by all..


After enjoying our second bowl of apple rhubarb crisp and ice cream, Adriana & I reminisced about skiing our food into RMBL during the early season.


Where did the summer go?

Meet Team Marmot: Jen Sojka

Greetings marmot fans! I am an undergraduate from Lake Forest College near Chicago, IL, working at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory this summer with Team Marmot. This is me and my science face.

Under the guidance of my mentor, Matt Petelle, I will be studying what affects the repeatability of personality in marmots. Personality by definition is repeatable across time and context. However, we know that many factors can affect how an animal responds to a given personality test, which therefore affect the repeatability. My work will examine the effects of microhabitat and habituation on tests of boldness and exploration in the yellow-bellied marmots near RMBL.

Since I arrived in the beginning of June I have learned how to take down social observations and help with weekly trappings including painting dye marks on marmots backs. Recently, I have begun my experiments to measure personality traits. The test for boldness involves me walking very slowly at marmots and recording the distances when the marmot notices me and when he escapes to his burrow. This is known as a flight initiation distance test.

To measure exploration, I use a novel object test. This test involves placing an object that marmots have never seen before (in this case, a floaty zebra toy named Ezekial) outside of a burrow with a bit of bait in front of it. I then record the activity of the marmots while they forage at the bait. The proportion of time spent looking for predators versus time spent foraging gives a measurement of how adventurous each marmot is.

The marmot, 3, in a drainpipe in Gothic.

I am having an excellent time so far, and I am looking forward to working against the weather to get lots of data in the name of science!

Meet Team Marmot: Malle Carrasco

Hi! My name is Malle (pronounced Maya). I am a biology student at Baylor University in Waco, Tx, and am enjoying the opportunity to not only do research with great people at RMBL, but also avoid the hot, humid weather! Back home I enjoy being a member and officer of a national sisterhood, biking down the river to Cameron Park, travelling, and being a supplemental instructor for physics (a lot more fun than it sounds).

I am usually found in the beautiful Baylor Sciences Building working in Dr. Stephen Trumble’s Lab of Ecological and Adaptational Physiology (LEAP) as an undergrad assistant. I have been helping his graduate student, Rebel Sanders, with her Master’s thesis - assaying baby salmon for effects of certain hatchery chemicals. It’s pretty neat research. I’ll get to continue that work this semester as well as help an ecology Master’s student with his field studies – bring on the herptiles! Now, I’m thrilled to have my own research project!

I am asking the question of whether the mule deer found in this area respond to marmot alarm calls. A fascinating part of animal behavior research is fear responses and how those are developed. Here in the valley, coyotes and foxes prey upon yellow-bellied marmots. Coyotes, especially, can be a nuisance for the young deer and fawn, too.

Adult female, Photo by Jenn Smith

It would be interesting to see if the mule deer have a separate response to marmot alarm calls versus the control, the crowned sparrow song. Furthermore, if there is a response in the deer community, I am also curious to know if there could possibly be a greater one from females that have fawn nearby.

A new fawn, Photo by Jenn Smith

Deer are cute creatures, but they have a very early wake up time. I can usually be found heading out to the “deer highways,” commonly used deer trails, at about five in the morning. I spend a majority of the time on the “hunt” looking for these camouflaged characters. Once I find one, I do all I can to get a behavioral observation before the deer bolts! Let’s just say some days are more successful than others.

On the bright side, being up so early means I get a head start on the day, hear many of the morning birds, and greet the sun as it crests over the mountains.

When I can make it back in time, I am fortunate enough to get to help the marmot team trap adults, and even my first pups the other day! The Marmoteers are great, extremely smart and hard-working people. I am looking forward to learning more with them in addition to my own “deering.”

50 Years of Marmot Research!!!

Building upon the pioneering efforts of Ken Armitage and the efforts of numerous marmoteers over the years, Dan Blumstein now oversees the marmot research project. As a result of these collaborative efforts, this project has been going for half of a century now.


Most projects only last for 3-4 years (the duration of a dissertation or granting period), so this is quite an accomplishment. To celebrate our golden anniversary, Dan made T-shirts! Check out the logo below:


And the current crew in the field wearing our shirts with pride!

Here's to another 50 years of new discoveries...and FUN!!!

Meet Team Marmot: Rachel Stafford-Lewis

Hello! My name is Rachel Stafford-Lewis and I am currently a sophomore undergraduate student majoring in Biology here at UCLA. As exemplified by the picture above of me with a horse, I am a huge animal person. Because of this and because of my interest in pursuing research, I was ecstatic when asked to join “team marmot” to assist with their research this quarter.

I had actually never heard of a marmot before this opportunity and I have come to realize that they are adorable creatures with intricate social networks that interact much like you and me.

My job will be to decipher these various social interactions and, more specifically, to analyze the maternal effects on these social networks. For now, I am doing computer-based analyses (see below), which includes creating dendrograms from the past year’s data collection in the field and assigning individual marmots to specific groups. Once I am acquainted with the each marmot’s social behaviors, I will investigate the factors shaping variation in the social interactions among individual marmots.

In the future I hope to travel with my fellow RMBL researchers to the Rocky Mountains so I can aid in the study of these magnificent creatures. The study of these particular marmots has been multi-generational and has been the basis of our research for many years, so I am thrilled to get hands-on experience, and learn from the best!

Meet Team Marmot: Kathleen Peshek

I first arrived at RMBL as Dan’s REU avian research student. That summer my project focused on estimating the American Robin’s large song repertoire through a comparison of techniques. Although my project involved birds, when the marmoteers needed an extra hand, I volunteered. That fall I continued to work on my project as in independent study at Michigan State University.

The following spring I was excited to accept Dan’s invitation to join the marmoteer team. I was able to enjoy a wonderful marmoteering experience in addition to beautiful hikes and the amazing scenery. I spent the majority of this summer trapping pups throughout the valley and observing the town marmots that live in Gothic, while fine-tuning my soon-to-be published paper from the previous summer.

Meet Team Marmot: Allie Anderson

Hello from chilly Wisconsin!

My name is Allie Anderson, and I am the most recent Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) student to work with the Marmot Crew. While most of the Marmoteers are based at UCLA, I hail from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point where I am a 4th year undergraduate student studying biology. This summer I was fortunate to be placed with Team Marmot through RMBL’s REU program that is funded by the National Science Foundation. I spent the summer collecting data for the lab as well as conducting my own research project investigating the effects of burrow distance on anti-predator vigilance behaviors in marmots.

My project looks at how marmots respond to the risk of being eaten as they travel farther from the safety of their burrow to forage. Marmots must eat and get fat in order to survive the winter hibernation, but eating requires marmots to leave their burrows, increasing the risk that they will become a predator’s tasty snack. I predicted that marmots would increase their vigilance behaviors as they moved farther from the burrow, but interestingly, I did not find this to be the case. There was only a significant change in marmot foraging behavior when other marmots were in the area.

Look for more updates as I continue working on my paper this winter.

Marmot pics courtesy of Yvonne Chi.

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's Jeffrey Sanker: The countdown is over!

The countdown is over!

Hello, my name is Jeffrey Sanker and I am a second year, undergraduate Biology major at UCLA. I’ve recently started working in the Blumstein lab at the beginning of the Fall 2010 quarter.

While in the lab, I look at blood slides taken from a number of marmots in order to preform cell counts. I tally the number of lymphocytes, neutrophils, monocytes, eosinophils, basophils, and trypanosomes observed in each blood slide.

Each slide examined is a small adventure. I never know what to expect when looking at each one under a microscope. There are times when the layer of cells are so thick that it is difficult to distinguish between certain types of cells. There are other times when identifying cells can be tedious due to the number of lymphocytes and neutrophils on a given slide being very scarce.

It is nearing the end of the Fall 2010 quarter and I am glad to announce that all two-hundred and fifty blood slides have been surveyed and their respective cell types accounted for. Currently, I am entering data recorded from each slide into the computer.

My hands-on work in the lab with Team Marmot has been an incredible experience and I look forward to coming to the Blumstein lab every day.

-- Jeffrey Sanker

Meet Team Marmot: Raquel Monclús

My name is Raquel Monclús (the one under the hat) and I am a post-doctoral fellow. I did my doctoral thesis in Spain studying European rabbits. I looked at how the rabbits respond to their predators. I got my doctor title in 2007 and then I got a Fulbright post-doctoral fellowship to come to study marmots, and in particular to study the indirect effects of predators.

Marmots, and most animals, have strategies to avoid (or at least try) being eaten. For instance, they regularly scan the environment to detect the presence of risky situations, and as they are alert they can act fast whenever their risk increases. However, being alert makes that some animals might have to reduce the time that they are feeding, so they cannot gain as much weight as those with fewer predators. And for marmots weight is essential if they have to spend 7 months under a huge cover of snow.

But why did I come all of the way from Spain to study marmots in Colorado? Because they are a great study system. Marmots live in groups; therefore, many individuals live in the same spot. They are diurnal, so one can easily observe many of them at the same time and they have different predators so not all of them face the same threats.

There are marmots in many places, including Spain, but these marmots, the ones we are studying, are special: they have been studied for nearly 50 years. So we have a deep knowledge of many aspects of their biology and ecology and it is just now when we can start answering interesting ecological questions about patterns, trends and dynamics. However, we will need another 50 years or so to know everything about marmots… We will try.

Meet Team Marmot: Julien Martin

I am a new postdoctoral fellow in the lab. I am interested in the impact of climate changes on the evolution of traits of yellow-bellied marmots.

I have done my M.S. on personality in wild chipmunks under the supervision of Pr. Denis Réale. My main interest was to establish if individuals differed in their behavior in a stressful situation and how these differences were related to hormones and human disturbance.

For my PhD, I worked on reproductive strategies of bighorn sheep females with Pr. Marco Festa-Bianchet. I was interested in how adult females allocate energy to reproduction or to survival under different conditions. In few words, bighorn females always favor their own body condition and survival over the ones of their lambs.

Photo taken by Alice Branbilla.

Because I have not yet done any field work at RMBL, I do not have any photos with me and a cute marmot. However, here is a picture of with a male bighorn lamb of 4 months back when I still had a beard (--luckily lambs grow much faster than does facial hair).

Meet Team Marmot: Back in the lab with Kelley Lu

My name is Kelley Lu and I am an undergraduate student. When I’m in the lab, I count the number of neutrophils, lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, basophils, and trypanosomes in the blood slides that the marmot team retrieved from marmots on site. I count the number of each type of cell until I reach a 100 sum between the neutrophils and lymphocytes. One of the difficulties I encounter when I’m working is the “unknown cell”. Occasionally, I will bump into a cell that I can’t identify—it looks like a neutrophil, but it also looks like an eosinophil… or sometimes a lymphocyte-looking cell that looks like a monocyte. Other times, the slide will have too many cells, and such a thick layer that I can’t discern between the different types of cells, or the slide will have too few cells, and there won’t be enough cells to count. My favorite part of working in the lab is clicking the counter, because I love the sound it makes when it clicks. It’s also a small triumph every time I click the counter, because each “click” simply means I’m one cell count closer to reaching the 100 sum for the neutrophils and lymphocytes.

~Kelley Lu

Meet Team Marmot: Nicole Munoz

I’m interested in how animals use their senses to detect predators in order to avoid being eaten. Predators make sounds, have a shape and even mark areas where prey live with urine in order to tell others “Hey! This is my meal!” Of course prey don’t want to be eaten, but they are often doing other activities like getting food or socializing, which are also important for their survival. So how do animals know when the likelihood of being eaten is so high that they should stop doing what they’re doing in order to stay alive? The smells, sounds and sights of predators give prey information that they use to make this decision.

You might think that only psychologists study how the mind interprets multiple senses. But, as a behavioral ecologist, I also think understanding the mind of animals is interesting! You have probably noticed that when you’re in a noisy room, it’s easier to understand what someone is saying if you can also see their lips moving. This is because you’re unconsciously using information from your vision (moving lips) in combination with audio information to form comprehensive meaning.

(Making observations in the field)

By doing experiments out in nature I’m discovering that marmots can also combine information about the smells and sounds of predators to make decisions about their behavior! Understanding how the minds of animals process multiple sensory cues is also important for conservation. Human actions often introduce noise into the environment (e.g. air pollutants or traffic noise) that might block predator cues, so we need to know how losing information from one sense negatively affects animals’ ability to escape predators.

Meet Team Marmot: Adriana Maldonado

I am a first year Fullbright Doctoral Fellow from Colombia, where I worked with Capybaras, the biggest rodent of the world! They are cool animals, and the best part is that they are rodents, as marmots!

I am studying how individuals of a population can help to cope with environmental fluctuations. So, I will mark marmots and look how they modify some of their behaviors such as the time they wake up from hibernation during the spring, the number of pups they have, the weight they gain, and when do they go to sleep again for the winter. Also, I will record environmental information such as temperature and snow. Then, I will explore if the marmots change their behavior when the weather conditions change.

This is me in the field giving eartags to a new pup.

The next step in step in my research is to represent the marmot life cycle and test if the individual differences among marmots have consequences in the rhythm at which the population grows. To do this, I will use population modeling methods, math and statistics.

Visiting Fullbright Fellow: From Pikas in India to Team Marmot

Royle's pika

Royle's pika

American pika

My name is Sabuj Bhattacharyya, and I am a PhD student at Wildlife Institute of India and presently a Fulbright fellow at University of Colorado, Boulder, working on effects of climatic fluctuation on foraging efficiency of American pika. My ongoing PhD work deals with various aspects of timberline ecology specially to study the habitat use and density patterns of a small lagomorph, Royle’s pika, distributed along sub-alpine – alpine ecotone.

Apart from my PhD research, I have also worked on habitat utilisation pattern of animals and birds along tree line in Western Himalaya, India. My broad research interests include high altitude small mammal ecology and behaviour with emphasis on foraging, distribution, habitat use and population dynamics.

Conservation and climate change issues are complex and require interdisciplinary approach to study. The students of ecology in the developing countries usually lack exposure to various study techniques and dimensions of conservation research.

Presently I am visiting Professor Dan Blumstein’s lab as a volunteer and learning to extract hormones from marmot fecal samples. I will apply this knowledge to extracting samples in my future studies in the Himalayas. Volunteering in the Blumstein Lab at UCLA is an intensely rewarding endeavor. I would like to return to India with a network of strong and lasting scientific relationships with Blumstein and his lab.

--Sabuj Bhattacharyya

Meet Team Marmot: Matthew Petelle

I am studying animal personality, or differences in individual behavior. Animal personality may be thought of as the strategy an individual uses when interacting with other marmots, how it chooses what habitat to forage in, and how it should react to a predator. Specifically, I study how personality variation is caused and maintained within a population of yellow-bellied marmots. There are a number of hypotheses that may explain why variation exists within a population and how it is maintained.

First, I have to figure out what the personality of each marmot is. To do this, I put marmots in specific situations and see how they react or behave. This allows me to place individuals on a personality trait continuum.