Daniel Blumstein

Dan Blumstein.

There are 15 species of marmots.

Groundhogs are one of those species.

Another name for groundhogs are woodchucks.

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

Whistle pig is a common name for some marmots.

Okay.

People call yellow-bellied marmots whistle pigs.

But in general, woodchucks are the least social of the 15 species of marmots.

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 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.