Daniel Blumstein

My colleague, um, basically we're, we're banging our heads together.

Why are they hibernating?

We've turned off the lights.

We've turned down the temperature what's going on.

And he came in one morning and he had an insight and his insight was, oh,

Maybe we need to give them bedding.

So he put in some paper towels, and the next day they were all curled up and hibernating.

They made their little beds, they curled up, they hibernated, and that was it.

Well, the mattress is soft.

They're rodents.

They have teeth, and they use them.

I'm not putting my fingers in their mouth.

Animals bite because I've been bitten by marmots.

Yeah.

You know, and so marmots bite.

Have you ever gotten stitches from a marmot?

I've not gotten stitches, but I'm probably an error at what's probably viewed as an erroneous data point in some CDC database, if there is a CDC anymore, because I got bitten by a hibernating marmot, because we had the power outage and taking them out, and the baby, a pup that was going through his first hibernation, it was about a kilo and a half, it was very cute, and I was cuddling it, and it had woken up enough that it just took a chunk out of my finger, so I went to the ER for that one.

Rabies, maybe if there's been one groundhog, maybe.

But they don't really have rabies.

Plague is an issue, but it's not an issue yet really.