Daniel Blumstein

What kind of tails do they have?

Well, they're not as bushy as tree squirrels, but they have a bushy tail.

And they use their tail for communication.

And the long-tailed marmot, the golden marmots I studied, subspecies of the long-tailed marmots, really use their tails a lot.

Groundhogs have tails.

They use their tails.

So in an incredible bout of good luck when I was just finishing my PhD and I was using alarm calls to scare marmots to understand how their attention was compromised, to understand the risks of being engaged in different behaviors.

When you're playing, you're focusing on your play partner, not on predators.

It's risky.

Play is risky.

So therefore, you play next to your burrow.

I said, I really want to study the evolution of alarm calling in marmots.

People were saying, oh, well, referential communication is something you want to study, word-like communication.

And I'm like, marmots are a great system to study the evolution of this.

And I wrote a postdoc proposal and got funded to go around the world and continue studying marmot screams and whistles and chirps and whatever.

So the first thing you should realize is don't believe anything you read because I was unable to find any strong evidence that they have word-like communication.

They communicate risk a variety of different ways, which are super cool.

Some call more.

Some call faster.

But it's not as though they have one type of whistle or chirp for an aerial predator and one type for a terrestrial predator.