Daniel Blumstein

And I was looking at any 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 a super intact predator community with these beautiful marmots in an uninhabited meadow, you know, up at 14,300 feet, you know, dying and getting very strong.

No, I'm a slug.

I'm falling apart.

My New Year's resolution is something I can achieve.

I'm going to gain five pounds and start smoking cigars.

Maybe every evening.

Don't beat yourself up on resolutions.

Do something you can achieve.

I mean, this is sort of an enthusiast's description, right?

So groundhogs have relatively bigger ears than other ones.

They're not rabbits.

Okay.

Not even pika.

So no, they have pretty small ears.

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 um things that chase them foxes and canids cougars and snow leopards badgers and bears um

So, you know, they have to deal with all these forms of predation.