10/31/2023 0 Comments Looks that kill parents guideMarmots require wide-open prairie spaces to alert their family members to the threat of approaching predators. Other climate-related changes act as threat multipliers for the rodents. While marmots are not classed as endangered, the cycle is causing the population to steadily drop by 4% a year, Bonenfant says. Females are producing smaller litters, which researchers also attribute to the climate crisis. The rise in changeovers in dominant couples leads to increased infanticides of the marmot pups that do survive the winter. “The consequences are that we see social structures and family groups which are less stable over time.” “They’ll take their chances directly rather than staying in the family group,” he says. That means there are fewer incentives for subordinates to remain loyal. Today, baby marmots are as likely to die in large family groups as the young of a single dominant couple, Bonenfant says. As snow cover gets thinner, the burrows get colder, making marmot pups less likely to survive the winter, even with their family’s body warmth to help them. Families rely on a thick layer to insulate their burrows, where they spend half the year in hibernation. In the age of global heating, marmots are suffering from the same scourge as the nearby ski resorts: not enough snow. Conflicts are increasing, and subordinates are leaving their family groups earlier, leading to more fights for dominance.īonenfant exercises extreme care in his mission to study and help the rodent. It has also revealed that the rapidly warming climate of the Alps is making each season of the game of burrows more bloodthirsty than the last. “We called them the Lannisters,” she says.ĭata collected from La Grande Sassière by scientists at the Université de Lyon since the project began in 1990 has provided much of what we know today about the alpine marmot and its despotic ways. Out on patrol, Garcia points out a far-flung territory where a brother and sister shacked up and established a new dynasty last year. The team calls this war for dominance “Game of Burrows”, referencing the interfamilial backstabbing and vicious power struggles of a certain prestige television show. “The new dominant will kill off that year’s young so as not to have to look after them – no investment, no parenting for young that are not his own,” Bonenfant says. When a marmot wins the battle for new territory, its first act is mass infanticide. If a subordinate of either sex wishes to reproduce, they must leave their family group and challenge another dominant marmot for its territory – or kill their parents. Only the dominant pair may reproduce: they bully the other family members into sterility, the youngsters’ stress hormones maintained at too high a level to bear young of their own. The rodents live in family groups with one dominant couple and a clutch of subordinate offspring who help with raising young and providing much-needed body warmth during the long winter hibernation.Īlpine marmots in their unending struggle for dominance. When they finish, the marmot will return to its place in a cycle of what Bonenfant calls “despotic reproduction”. The clock is ticking: a marmot can lose its territory in less than an hour. Together, Garcia and Bonenfant have 30 minutes to bring the marmot down from the mountain, anaesthetise it, measure it, take samples of blood, hair and droppings, revive it and return it to the site where it was captured – all while avoiding a set of teeth capable of severing a human finger. The clock is ticking: a marmot can lose its territory in less than an hour It is a sweltering summer day down at sea level, but 2,400m up the snow is still shin-deep in places and fog rolls through the valley, periodically obscuring the Aiguille de la Grande Sassière peak. In a tiny lab set inside a mountain chalet near the French-Italian border, Garcia, the site’s technician, waits for Bonenfant and his seething charge. The ecologist Christophe Bonenfant on the mountainside, a marmot cage strapped to his back.
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