The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Life in the mountains might get easier… at least in the short term
For the layman, it might be like a Major League baseball pitcher making the cover of Sports Illustrated. Or a politician hitting the cover of Time. It doesn’t get much bigger in the scientific world. Studies conducted at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic made the July 22 cover of Nature, the International Weekly Journal of Science.
Touting a huge picture of a marmot, the headline is “Waking Up to Global Warming. The rodent linking climate change to population trends.” The story focuses on a 33-year study by Arpat Ozgul at RMBL that links the seasonal timing of reproduction and migration and even body size of marmots to climate change.
“This is huge for us,” explained RMBL executive director Dr. Ian Billick.
“There are two journals, Nature and Science, that are considered the top scientific journals. A wide range of scientists across the world, not just biologists, read them. So the article will get significant attention, and in fact it was featured on NPR last week.”
National Public Radio’s Robert Siegel of All Things Considered spoke with Dan Blumstein, a co-author of the study and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA, who has been studying marmots in Gothic for the past ten years. “For the past 49 years marmots in Gothic have been studied by scientists and students, and it is through these long-term studies that we can gain important insights into what’s happening, what’s happened and ultimately identify mechanisms through which we may be able to predict what might happen in the future,” said Blumstein.
Billick said that the article, which called upon research from several RMBL scientists, basically states that while scientists know that plants and animals are changing, this is one of the first times it has been worked out why they are changing. Marmots emerge earlier in the year, they get bigger before they hibernate, more of them survive winter, and so there are more marmots than there used to be in the Upper East River Valley.
“This is considered scientifically important because knowing why things are changing—knowing why there are more marmots, makes it easier to predict how other populations, perhaps game populations like deer and elk, will change in the future,” Billick said. ”It’s still a big jump to make predictions, but it suggests that as things get warmer life in the mountains will be a little easier, at least in the short term. It’ll take a series of studies like this before we get the big picture on how the ecosystems will change in the future, but it is a piece in the puzzle.”
Building upon a research program begun by Dr. Ken Armitage in 1961, the authors of the study have shown that marmots are waking up earlier in the spring from hibernation and weaning their young earlier due to warmer temperatures.
Billick said that RMBL would be seen in a good light within the scientific community. “In terms of RMBL, it highlights the value of being able to track relatively undisturbed populations over extended periods of time, in this case 30-plus years,” he said. ”Understanding how plants and animals are changing requires long-term research. Given that RMBL has one of the largest collections of long-term data in the world, it emphasizes the importance of research done at RMBL, as well as validates the general approach of intensively studying a single location like the Upper East River Valley.”
Credit for the study was also given to the 1,190 live-trapped female marmots that were caught between 1976 and 2008.
