Daniel Blumstein

And they're more or less weaned.

And we don't know who died in the burrow.

And we don't know who was absorbed and reabsorbed.

So the Russians who've studied all these, you know, marmots have found all sorts of really interesting reabsorption of embryos.

So there's all sorts of maternal control over what's going on.

In any event, we catch pups as soon as they emerge.

So we can say, of six babies, five were males and one was a female.

So that is a male-biased litter.

Or four were females and two were males.

That is a female-biased litter.

So it turns out that females in male-biased litters are more androgenized.

They have a greater antigenital distance.

They engage in more sort of rough play and male-like baby behavior, pup behavior.

They're more likely to disperse.

But if they don't disperse,

they're less likely to breed as two-year-olds.

So here is natural variation in hormones.

We had some people from Berkeley, some toxicology lab, who used to work at Rumble, said, oh, send me some marmot blood.

They said, we can find no evidence of chemical pollutants in this blood.

This is cleaner than polar bears or anything else we've studied in nature.