BY MARY DANG
UCLA Today Staff
They are cute, cuddly ... and incredibly dull.
That is what their No. 1 fan, Dan Blumstein,
an associate professor of organismic biology, ecology and evolution,
says candidly about marmots (more specifically, groundhogs)
and their sociological behavior. As the leading marmot expert,
or “marmoteer,” in his field, Blumstein finds that
people scarcely know anything about groundhogs — except
for their dubious talent as winter weather prognosticators on
Feb. 2, Groundhog Day.
That’s when these otherwise lethargic,
but cute, hirsute animals capture the attentive adoration of
some 35,000 marmotophiles who congregate at Punxsutawney, Pa.,
to witness Punxsutawney Phil’s prediction of how long
winter will last.
In actuality, Blumstein said, “Groundhogs
are really boring. They are the least social of all the marmots.
They live, more or less, alone, whereas other species have huge
family groups.”
With the scientific moniker of Marmota monax, these rodents
can grow to the size of cats. Usually holed up sleeping inside
their burrows from October until February or March, they are
known as true hibernators.
“People think about bears as hibernators,
but bears can’t hibernate. They’re too big, and
they can’t lose enough body heat. But marmots do lose
body heat,” said Blumstein, who has been called the world’s
reigning expert on marmot alarm calls. He even has a robotic
badger that he uses to elicit such calls.
Still, for the Punxsutawnians, Blumstein said,
“A midwinter festival is really necessary if you live
in a place where it’s cold and where you want something
to give you hope that the winter might be over.”
But their choice of the groundhog as their
resident meteorologist, based on an old Candlemas verse, goes
contrary to the animal’s true sleeping habits.
“Groundhog Day is a bad day to see marmots
because most are hibernating,” the biologist noted.
