High in the Colorado mountains, marmots experienced a difficult winter after a severe lack of snow cover caused the deaths of two-thirds of one monitored population during hibernation. Those that survived spent the summer fattening up for the upcoming hibernation period while also preparing for the inaugural Fat Marmot Week. Modeled on Alaska's Fat Bear Week online contest, Fat Marmot Week—which begins Monday—is mostly intended as a fun event, but it carries a vital purpose: raising donations for long-running rodent research facing federal budget cuts.
"In some sense, we’re going to be laughing our way down as the Titanic sinks," said Dan Blumstein, leader of the project launched decades ago at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. "Because what else are you going to do?" Marmots are cat-sized, furry ground squirrels that inhabit burrows across North America, Europe, and Asia. The roughly 15 species worldwide include groundhogs, which have their own annual celebration on Feb. 2 in the U.S. and Canada.
Yellow-bellied marmots are common throughout the Rocky Mountains, where hikers regularly spot them sitting on boulders or moving through alpine wildflowers. The animals are accustomed to humans along popular trails, and bold individuals are known to swipe snacks from passersby. Emily Renkey, a master’s student at the University of California, Los Angeles, noted that marmots display distinct personalities and are "flexibly social," with some residing in colonies of up to 30 individuals and others remaining solitary.
"We kind of understand these marmots just by looking at them sometimes, because we can kind of tell who’s who just by how they behave and how they interact with one another," said UCLA doctoral student Katie Adler. Renkey explained that certain marmots are difficult to study because they avoid wire traps baited with oats and peanut butter. "Others, you could trap three or four times in the same morning," she said.
Unlike bears, which wake periodically from torpor during winter, marmots undergo a much deeper state of hibernation. Their body temperature drops from near-human levels to around 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), barely warmer than the winter temperature inside their burrows. "You pick up a hibernating marmot and it’s this fuzzy ball and it feels like a cold rock with fur.
It’s completely surreal," Blumstein said. "They breathe once a minute or two." To prepare for winter, the animals feed heavily, doubling their weight to up to 13 pounds (6 kilograms) before shedding all of that bulk over more than six months underground. "Marmots come out of the ground really skinny, relative to what they look like now, at least," Adler said.
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