Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Oh, hey, it's the lady next to you at the salad bar covering up her iceberg lettuce with spring greens, Allie Ward. And this is Ologies. This is Big Squirrels. We got marmots. We got groundhogs. We got facts, figures, tongue twisters, and scandals. But first, thank you so much to patrons of the show. They make it possible. And you too can submit your questions before we record.
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Okay, so marmotology, the word marmot goes back to the Latin root meaning mountain mouse. And this week we have a true expert. They did their undergrad at the University of Colorado Boulder and then went to UC Davis for a master's and a PhD in animal behavior. They are now a researcher and a professor at UCLA's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
They've spent years and years and years studying the complex communication of marmots and integrating that into conservation efforts to influence environmental policy. And on a rainy January day here in LA a few weeks ago, I got over to the university to lob some questions. First, just got to UCLA. I'm here to interview the groundhog expert.
I got out of my car and I spilled 20 ounces of cold iced tea onto my crotch. It's so soaked. Like it's not a little wet. It's soaked like I had hosed myself off.
This is what happens when you do interviews in person. You really never know what you're going to get.
Hey, I'm Allie. You waiting for me? Sorry about my pants. we're already off to a memorable start. But clearly our ologist and the lovely Holly Ober in UCLA Media Relations, they were chill, they were down to clown. We went up to his office where he has all sorts of skulls and marmot art, even a roadkill groundhog that he and his wife Janice taxidermied themselves.
And we chatted all about the rodent du jour, including how and why we celebrate Groundhog's Day, the Buddhism and paganism of the midwinter slump. Romantic advice you should not take from a marmot.
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Chapter 2: What is marmotology and why is it important?
I thought they were different animals.
We have a holiday named after them, and it's about behavior and climate and weather and what's not to love about woodchucks.
The fact that they are a Venn diagram that is just one circle is astounding me. What about whistle pig? What's up with that?
Whistle pig is a common name for some marmots. Okay. People call yellow-bellied marmots whistle pigs. But in general, woodchucks are the least social of the 15 species of marmots.
Don't talk to me.
Babies emerge and then disperse in their first year of life. They may settle around their mom and My friend and colleague Chris Mayer at University of Maine is studying woodchuck behavior in detail and has shown that there's a little more sociality than most people think about when they look at woodchucks. But the other species are more social.
So I study yellow-bellied marmots, which are socially plastic. And what's really interesting about that is it allows us to understand the dynamics of what's good about being social. Not a lot of things for marmots. We can get into that. The rest of the species are much more social. And the kids stick around for a couple of years
And in some cases, there's mothers are mating with sons to keep them around and alpine marmots. You know, you should not use marmots as a model for our behavior. There's all sorts of sordid stuff going down with marmots.
You really want to know? I do. So a groundhog is a type of marmot.
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Chapter 3: How do groundhogs communicate and what sounds do they make?
And trying to improve over time. But I mean, there's a New Yorker essay about this years ago about, you know, oh, well, blah, blah, blah, all major religions see something in Groundhog Day about self-discovery and improvement and being better to others. And so Groundhog Day is more of a metaphorical thing in the movie.
Speaking of future, past, reliving, do you feel like you were destined to work on Marmots or did you land into it accidentally?
I used to get paid to bicycle around the world. I didn't get paid a lot. I mean, I had sponsors, you know, and this is before cell phones and influencers and things like that. So I just sort of wrote stuff and took pictures and got sponsors to help pay for my trips bicycling around the world. And I got into Davis for grad school. I didn't know what I was going to study.
I knew I wanted to speak international, maybe conservation-y, but I also was really into behavior. And I'm bicycling with an old girlfriend around. We tried to bicycle around India, Nepal, Pakistan. We tried to bicycle around the Himalayan Karakoram. China blocked our attempts at two places. We got into, you know, Nepal and couldn't get over. They wouldn't let us in.
So we bicycled around the northern areas of Pakistan, the Karakoram. And so I get up to northern Pakistan and it's gorgeous. And I find myself on the border of China.
camping in a place called Clint Robb National Park and there are marmots everywhere and they're super social and there are foxes everywhere there's snow leopards we didn't see them and it's like the marmots were fighting the foxes off and away from them and I'm like this is pretty cool and I said I wonder if I could you know study these guys here so I ended up looking at antipredator behavior and
And I was looking at any predator behavior of these guys and thinking about how do you think about the riskiness of different behaviors cognitively. So I was doing experiments in northern Pakistan in a super intact predator community with these beautiful marmots in an uninhabited meadow, you know, up at 14,300 feet, you know, dying and getting very strong.
Oh, my God. Do you still bicycle a lot?
No, I'm a slug.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Groundhog Day in culture?
Of course they have tails. 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.
What about groundhogs?
Groundhogs have tails. They use their tails.
This was a question from Anna Ward, Mel, Justin Murphy, Stratwegic, and Adam Foote. They want to know, do groundhogs communicate with high-pitched or low-frequency tones or both? They say, I feel like I've heard them squeak, but underground it seems like low vibrations would work better.
Stratwegic wanted to know, I'd like to hear the whistle of a whistle pig and why this usually solitary creature vocalizes. How are they communicating? Is it chirps and whistles? Is it 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. As do vervet monkeys. Vervet monkeys are pretty cool. As do chickens. As do a lot of, some species, not all. Some primates, not all primates, have word-like communication for different sorts of predators. They may label them.
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