Daniel Blumstein

But again, the,

What's a mass?

If something ranges from 2.5 to 5 kilos, you know, from 6 to 12 or 15 pounds a year, how big are groundhogs?

What's a group size if groups are varying constantly?

I study social behavior.

I don't know what a social group is.

I mean, is it who emerges from hibernation, which is kind of what we use in many cases?

Is it when the yearlings disperse and the babies are up?

I mean, what's a social group when things are so much in flux?

we like to come up with easy ways to describe things, but I think studying marmots makes you think about a number of things.

And one of those things is the sort of relativistic nature of how we study things.

You know, there's Buddhism everywhere if you start looking for it.

Not being super social is about as costly for your longevity as smoking.

So we study the socially plastic species, yellow-bellied marmots.

Turns out that many ways we're looking at sociality, the more social animals are, the less likely they are

to survive.

The shorter they live, the less reproductive success they have, particularly for females.

So there are some benefits of sociality, but we are also finding lots of costs of being too socially integrated with others.

What's that do?

Well, you're less likely to survive the winter.