Vancouver Island Marmot :: Marmota vancouverensis

Bad at Goodbyes :: Episode 021

On today’s show we learn about the Vancouver Island Marmot, a critically endangered mammal native to Western North American, specifically to Vancouver Island in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

• (00:05) Intro
• (02:05) Species Information
• (27:02) Citations
• (28:58) Music
• (34:45) Pledge

Research for today’s show was compiled from

• Animal Diversity Web at the University of Michigan – https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Marmota_vancouverensis/ 
• Canadian Field-Naturalist Vol 100, Issue 2 – http://doi.org/10.5962/p.355598 
• Canadian Journal of Zoology vol 74 issue 4 – http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/z96-076 
• Canadian Journal of Zoology vol 83 issue 5 – http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/z05-056 
• Canadian government’s Species at Risk Assessments and Status Reports – https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/species-risk-public-registry/cosewic-assessments-status-reports/vancouver-island-marmot-2019.html 
• Canada’s National Observer’s State of the Animal Special Report – https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/11/23/news/endangered-vancouver-island-marmot-conservation-comeback 
• IUCN – https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/12828/22259184
• Mammalian Species, Issue 270 – https://doi.org/10.2307/3503862 
• The Marmot Recovery Foundation – https://marmots.org 
• Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_Island_marmot

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A note on accuracy: I strive for it! These episodes are well-researched and built from scholarly sources, hoping to provide an informed and accurate portrait of these species. That said, I’m an ambient musician! I am not an academic and have limited scientific background. I may get things wrong! If you are using this podcast for scholarship of any kind, please see the cited sources and double-check all information

Welcome to Bad at Goodbyes.

On today’s show we consider the Vancouver Island Marmot

The Vancouver Island Marmot is a critically endangered mammal native to western North American, specifically to Vancouver Island in the Canadian province of British Columbia.

And it is so cute. It's so fuzzy, and it's got a little white snout. These furballs are so charming.

The Vancouver Island Marmot is a large rodent belonging to the Sciuridae family, which includes squirrels, chipmunks, and woodchucks.

Adult Vancouver Island Marmot typically reach a length of about two feet from nose to tail. About the size of a housecat. Average weight ranges from 7 to 15 lbs, with their weight peaking just before hibernation in the fall.

They have a rounded body with short, powerful legs. Their forelimbs are strong, equipped with long, curved claws adapted for digging, for excavating burrows. The hind limbs are also clawed, though less pronounced, adapted for traction and stability when navigating rocky terrain.

Their fur is dense, a mix of rich chocolate brown on the back and shoulders, fading to a lighter reddish-brown on their sides and underbelly, with a white patch on their snout. The fur is composed of a thick undercoat overlaid with longer guard hairs, the undercoat provides insulation and the guard hairs help to keep their fur relatively dry.

Their small dark brown eyes are positioned on both sides of their head, providing them with a wide field of view, able to discern movement at a distance. Their color vision is believed to be limited, better adapted for the lowlight environment of their underground burrows

Their rounded (and adorable) ears are adept at sensing a range of sounds, including the subtle rustle of a predator approaching or the distant alarm calls of other marmot. Studies suggest they are particularly sensitive to sounds in the higher frequency range, which helps them detect airborne predators like eagles or hawks, so tuned in to like the sound of wind across feather.

The Vancouver Island Marmot's snout is white-furred and its nose is flat and black with prominent nostrils. Their olfactory sense, their sense of smell, is particularly keen. They use scent to mark territory, identify other marmot, to detect the presence of potential mates and potential predators, and to find food sources. Marmots have sensitive vibrissae, or whiskers, pocking their snout. These are specialized touch-sensitive hairs that aid in navigation through burrows and crevices, and can detect changes in air currents.

Vancouver Island Marmot are herbivores, with a dental structure adapted to their plant diet. They have a single large incisor in both the upper and lower jaws. Kind of like a beaver. These chisel-like teeth grow continuously throughout the marmot's life as they are worn down from gnawing through tough vegetation. Their molars have broad, flat surfaces adapted for grinding and crushing plant matter.

Vancouver Island Marmot are diurnal, meaning they are most active during the day and sleep at night. They typically foraging for food in the early morning and late afternoon.

They have a widely varied diet, based on season and plant species availability. They are known to eat over 40 different kinds of grasses, herbs and wildflowers. When available they prefer flowers, fruits, fresh buds, and the fresh fiddleheads of the bracken fern.

I just want to highlight this. Marmots eat flowers. And so you don’t have to do this right now, but maybe when you're having a rough day, image-search “marmots eating flowers.” It helps.

In the spring, they primarily eat grasses: oatgrass, woodrush and sedge. In the summer, their diet consists of meadowrue, cow parsnip, woolly sunflower, Broadleaf Lupine and peavine. In the early fall, they focus on consuming high-calorie foods, actively seeking energy-rich plant parts like seeds and fruits to build up fat reserves for hibernation.

The Vancouver Island Marmot hibernates, on average for 210 days of the year. Um, that’s a lot! Like 7 months of the year, little fuzz is sleeping it off. Compare that to bear for example, who hibernate about 4 months and other marmot species about 5. 7 is a lot.

So what does that look like?

Hibernation is a survival adaptation to endure winters when food is scarce and temperatures drop. It is a physiological state of reduced metabolic activity, so like slowing digestion and waste production, slowing heartrate and breathing and lowering body temperature. This enables the marmot to conserve energy and survive on stored fat reserves.

In October, as the days shorten and temperatures drop, the Vancouver Island Marmot retreat to their burrows. They close up the entrances with soil and vegetation, creating an insulated underground chamber.

During hibernation, their body temperature drops dramatically, hovering just above freezing. Their heart rate slows to a few beats per minute, and their breathing becomes shallow and infrequent. They remain in this state for weeks at a time, punctuated by brief periods of wakefulness where they may shift positions or expunge waste.

As spring approaches and outdoor temperatures rise, the marmots emerge from their burrows, and their metabolism gradually returns to normal function. And they again begin this cycle of spending the warm months building up internal fat reserves, to weather the winter hibernation, relying entirely on those reserves for sustenance.

This is, as you might imagine, a vital adaptation to their habitat.

The Vancouver Island Marmot is native to Vancouver Island, located off the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. Their habitat lies within the Vancouver Island Ranges, this is a mountainous region that stretches along the island's center. This bioregion is called the Coastal Western Hemlock zone.

The Vancouver Island Marmot live in high-altitude meadows in the subalpine and alpine zones of these mountains, roughly 3 thousand to 4 feet above sea level. Subalpine and Alpine refers to the treeline, the ecological zone, above which trees cannot grow due to harsh environmental conditions; subalpine is below the treeline and has trees, alpine is above the treeline, so no trees.

The Vancouver Island Marmot meadow habitats are often south or west-facing, maximizing the sun exposure that is crucial for early snowmelt and the early new growth of the vegetation they feed on.

I should have mentioned this earlier, but the marmot emerge from hibernation hungry, like super hungry, and so timing here is crucial - needing to leave hibernation into a landscape that is generally clear of snow in which new plant growth, their food source, has already begun.

The winters are cool and wet, with snowfalls exceeding 80 inches (that’s like nearly seven feet) and temperatures that regularly dip below zero. Summer is mild and relatively dry, with temperatures reaching into the upper 70s.. And the flora responds, to soils damp with snowmelt and a few months of warm temperatures. Summer is a landscape of rolling rocky meadows interspersed with vibrant color patches of wildflowers blooming, backdropped by ragged peaks, clothed in mist and green forest.

And into this rich soil of their meadow habitat, the Vancouver Island Marmot, digs. Their homes are extensive burrow systems dug deep to serve as shelter from predators, a refuge for hibernation, and a haven for raising young. A typical burrow system will have multiple entrances, interconnecting tunnels, and internal chambers for sleep, birthing and social interaction. Marmots share their burrows, it is a communal living space for family groups or colonies that are reused year-over-year. Scientists have observed several burrow systems have been occupied for over 30 years by generations of the same family groups or colonies.

A family group typically consists of a single adult male, one or two adult females, and their offspring. Colonies are generally made up of two to three family units. Within a colony, social hierarchies are established through displays of dominance like lunging, chasing, and tail raising. And Vancouver Island Marmots can be territorial, using scent glands to mark their boundaries.

Scientists have also observed socially cohesive behaviors like nose-touching as a greeting, grooming one another, playfighting and chase games.

The Vancouver Island Marmot also exhibits sentinel behavior, where one or a few individuals will position themselves in a location with a good vantage point, and scan the surroundings for predators, like Cougar, Grey Wolf, or Golden Eagle. If a threat is detected, the sentinel will sound an alarm call, alerting the rest of the colony to return to the safety of the burrow.

The alarm call of the Vancouver Island Marmot is a very loud, high-pitched whistle. Researchers have documented five distinct whistles or trills that seem to be used by the marmot for different purposes.

Vancouver Island Marmots have a monogamous mating system, and pairings will last over multiple breeding seasons, though males have been recorded siring more than one litter in a single breeding season.

Because mating occurs within their burrows, we have limited knowledge of specific mating behavior. We do know that mating generally occurs once a year in the early spring after hibernation. Gestation lasts about a month and the female gives birth, in the burrow, to litters of 3 to 4 pups, who are nursed for about a month and then emerge from the burrow. Juveniles reach reproductive maturity at about 3 years old at which point young males will leave the colony, often traveling 10 to 30 miles to establish new families and colonies on their own new territory.

Vancouver Island Marmot's average lifespan is 10 years, though they can live up to 15 years of age.

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In the dream, I too, know winterrest, in the dream I know the sweet kiss of the son of night, kin of death, and the snow falls and the light wanes and the breath slows and I am safe, in the dream, safe among my kin blood and chosen, safe enough to sleep and trust the springtime’s promise. In the dream.

————

Historically, habitat loss due to overlogging and forest clear-cutting, and then resultant over abundance of predators drove the Vancouver Island Marmot to the very brink of extinction. So human resource overuse reshapes the habitat in ways that temporarily favor predator species, who decimate the marmot population. But with a reduced prey population, the predator species is then threatened by lack of available food. An ecosystem that was slowly balanced over millennia, is subjected to rapid untenable and unsustainable fluctuation due to human intrusion.

Relatedly, human induced climate change poses a forthcoming threat. As mentioned early, the annual hibernation cycles of the Vancouver Island Marmot have very tight margins. So changes in weather patterns, caused by human induced climate change, that affect snowmelt and spring plant growth, could result in hibernation mortality.

Most recent counts estimate that less than 250 Vancouver Island Marmot remain in the wild.

Animal Diversity Web at the University of Michigan – https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Marmota_vancouverensis/

Canadian Journal of Zoology vol 74 issue 4 – http://dx.doi.org/10.1139/z96-076

Canadian government’s Species at Risk Assessments and Status Reports – https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services/species-risk-public-registry/cosewic-assessments-status-reports/vancouver-island-marmot-2019.html

IUCN – https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/12828/22259184

The Marmot Recovery Foundation – https://marmots.org

Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vancouver_Island_marmot

I honor the lifeforce of the Vancouver Island Marmot. I will carry its human name in my record. I am grateful to have shared time on our planet with this being. I lament the ways in which I and my species have harmed and diminished this species.

And so, in the name of the Vancouver Island Marmot I pledge to reduce my consumption. And my carbon footprint. And curb my wastefulness. I pledge to acknowledge and attempt to address the costs of my actions and inactions. And I pledge to resist the harm of plant or animal kin or their habitat, by individuals, corporations, and governments.

I pledge my song to the witness and memory of all life, to a broad celebration of biodiversity, and to the total liberation of all beings.