Daniel Blumstein

But marmots are the kings of the ground squirrels.

So they're related to prairie dogs and ground squirrels, a little less related to tree squirrels.

There are lots of species of ground squirrels around the Northern Hemisphere and some in the Southern Hemisphere.

Prairie dogs are only in North America.

And marmots have a whole Arctic distribution.

They're found around the northern hemisphere, but not in the southern hemisphere.

Groundhogs have a really interesting distribution.

I think they go down into Georgia and they sort of go a swath across North America and end up in Fairbanks, Alaska.

So this asocial, grumpy marmot, and they're a little bigger than other species because they're not efficient hibernators.

They lose weight really quickly, so they get really fat and they lose a lot of weight.

And groundhogs are really cute because they have really big ears.

You look at them, you're like, that's a groundhog.

Marmots curl up into balls.

And when we hibernated marmots, it was super interesting.

And why was it super interesting?

Because we went in and we had a power outage.

It's like, oh, we better weigh them.

And we went into the hibernation room and pulled them out.

And they're wound up in a tight little ball.

And they feel like a fuzzy rock.