Daniel Blumstein

It's been so effective at educating people, in training people, and in coming up with biological and evolutionary insights that you don't get from, you know, short-term studies.

And we just can't get funded.

Well, it shouldn't matter the school you're at.

It should matter the science you're doing.

I think we're doing good science.

It's very, very frustrating.

And I don't know how I'm going to keep this thing going.

And I feel really obligated to keep it going because my colleague and late friend, Ken Armour, just started this thing.

It's the second longest study of individually marked mammals in the world.

The chimpanzees of the Gombe, which Jane Goodall started, is, quote, the longest.

These long-term studies, of which there are many, are priceless.

Many of them fail.

Many of them don't get passed on between generations.

Many of them die when the person retires.

Yet the insights we get from these are profound, and they're really important.

This is how we understand life around us.

If we want to understand plasticity, if we want to understand genetics,

how life, whether it's plant life or animal life, you know, is going to respond to an increasingly variable world.

We need long-term studies where we see different epics of selection.

And marmots are one of these really, you know, good long-term studies.