Calibrating the data logger…
Examines how yellow-bellied marmots and related ground-dwelling mammals navigate survival trade-offs across decades, linking life-history variation, social behavior, winter dormancy, and predation pressure through long-term mark-recapture and observational studies at high-elevation Colorado field sites.
Marmot Life History, Sociality, and Predator Ecology
Yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer) are the large, golden-brown ground squirrels that visitors to Gothic see sunning on rocks, whistling sharp alarms, and disappearing into burrows beneath meadow boulders. For more than six decades, researchers at RMBL have followed individually marked marmots from birth to death, making this population one of the longest-studied wild mammal systems in the world. Because marmots hibernate for roughly eight months, reproduce in tight seasonal windows, and live in family groups built around related females, they offer an unusually clear window into how mountain mammals balance the demands of growth, reproduction, predator avoidance, and social life in a short, variable alpine summer.
A handful of ideas recur throughout the findings below. Marmots are facultatively social, meaning individuals can live alone or in groups of related females (a matrilineal society) with one or a few breeding males, and group composition shifts each year through births, deaths, and dispersal (the movement of young marmots away from their birthplace) versus philopatry (staying home). Researchers quantify these relationships using social network analysis, which maps who interacts with whom and assigns each animal centrality measures describing how connected or influential it is. Marmots also illustrate the slow-fast continuum of life histories: they are relatively slow-lived hibernators whose winter survival and summer survival depend strongly on body condition heading into hibernation.
Because marmots are conspicuous prey for coyotes, foxes, golden eagles, and pine martens, much of their behavior reflects a time allocation tradeoff between foraging and vigilance behavior (scanning for predators). When they detect a threat, they perform alarm communication, producing whistles whose individual identity, urgency, and acoustic structure have been parsed in great detail. Researchers measure how risky a marmot perceives a situation to be using flight initiation distance (FID), the distance at which an animal flees an approaching human or model predator. Repeatable individual differences in boldness, docility, and sociability constitute animal personality and sometimes behavioral syndromes (suites of correlated traits). Long-term mark-recapture of every animal in the population, combined with weather and phenology data, lets researchers connect these behaviors to fitness, demography, and anthropogenic disturbance from hikers, bikers, and vehicles along Gothic's roads and trails.
Behaviors that reduce the likelihood of predation, including vigilance and evasion tactics
Survival of organisms through winter diapause or dormancy, often related to environmental conditions during overwintering
A commonly used framework to describe variation in life-history strategies across species, ranking organisms from slow to fast living based on combina...
Vocal signals produced in response to predator detection to warn conspecifics or communicate threat information
Population regulation mechanism where demographic rates depend on population density through competition and resource limitation
Quantifiable aspects of social behavior and social structure that can be subject to natural selection
A method used to quantify social relationships that not only quantifies the direct relationship between a focal individual and its social partners, bu...
A 20-year longitudinal study tracking individually marked female marmots through live-trapping, unique marking, and behavioral observations to quantif...
Live-trapping and marking of yellow-bellied marmots followed by systematic focal behavioral observations to quantify time allocation to different beha...
Direct observation of social interactions using binoculars and spotting scopes during peak activity periods. Interactions are classified as affiliativ...
Systematic measurement of antipredator escape behavior by approaching focal individuals at standardized speed and recording distances at key behaviora...
Integration of temperature, precipitation, and snow cover data from multiple weather stations and remote sensing platforms to characterize environment...
Digital recording and spectral analysis of alarm vocalizations to quantify entropy and goodness of pitch as measures of call structure and acoustic pr...
The slow-fast continuum is known to structure variation in life-history strategies across species. Within populations, it is also assumed to structure...
The fate of natural populations is mediated by complex interactions among vital rates, which can vary within and among years. While the effects of ran...
Seasonal environmental conditions shape the behavior and life history of virtually all organisms. Climate change is modifying these seasonal environme...
Humans in strong social relationships are more likely to live longer because social relationships may buffer stressors and thus have protective effect...
Amicable social interactions can enhance fitness in many species, have negligible consequences for some, and reduce fitness in others. For yellow-bell...
These R scripts contain the code to replicate the analyses performed in Demographic consequences of changing environmental periodicity , Ecology. Vita...
Early studies in the 1970s and 1980s established the basic social and evolutionary biology of the system. Downhower and Armitage described the polygynous mating system in which a male defends a harem of related females, showing that female fitness peaks at small harem sizes while males do best with two or three females (Downhower & Armitage, 1971). Armitage then synthesized comparative data across 18 burrowing sciurids to argue that sociality in marmots evolved as a life-history tactic: slow-growing, large-bodied species retain daughters in the maternal home range, extending maternal investment beyond weaning (Armitage, 1981). Schwartz and Armitage used allozyme data to show that this matrilineal substructure shapes the distribution of genetic variation among colonies, retarding the fixation of alleles and supporting a gradualist view of evolution in social mammals (Schwartz & Armitage, 1980).
The foundations of marmot behavioral ecology came together in the late 1990s. Blumstein and Armitage tested whether social complexity drives communicative complexity, finding that roughly 40 percent of variation in alarm-call repertoire size across ground squirrels could be explained by social complexity, though much variance remained (Blumstein & Armitage, 1997). Companion work showed that marmot whistles, trills, and chucks encode urgency and individual identity but are not tightly tied to specific predator types (Blumstein & Armitage, 1997). Van Vuren and Armitage quantified the long-debated cost of dispersal, finding that dispersing marmots survived only 16 percent less well than philopatric ones (Van Vuren & Armitage, 1994). Methodological reviews by Koenig and colleagues on dispersal estimation (Koenig et al., 1996) and later by Wey and colleagues on social network analysis (Wey et al., 2008) gave the field tools to push beyond simple group-size measures.
A central thread is that climate change has reshaped marmot demography. Ozgul and colleagues showed that earlier emergence from hibernation lengthened the growing season, allowing marmots to attain larger pre-hibernation body masses, increasing adult survival and driving population growth rate from roughly 1.02 to 1.18 (Ozgul et al., 2010). Subsequent long-term analyses revealed that summer survival has generally increased over forty years while winter survival has declined pub 509, and a recent cross-taxon synthesis confirms that fast-paced life histories are more sensitive to climate variation while slow-paced species like marmots tend to buffer their critical vital rates (Ickin et al., 2025).
A second thread concerns the surprisingly nuanced costs and benefits of sociality. Marmot societies show substantial reproductive skew, with most males never breeding (Blumstein, 2025). Yet stronger affiliative relationships are associated with shorter lifespans pub 706, and weakly affiliating females have higher annual reproductive success (pub 1300). Wey and Blumstein found that yearlings and kin structure hold colonies together more than previously appreciated (Wey & Blumstein, 2010), and a recent multilevel selection analysis showed that selection acts as strongly on group-level social structure as on individual sociability, with group cohesiveness favoring hibernation survival (Philson et al., 2025).
A third thread links alarm communication, predator risk, and individual variation. Marmot whistles carry individual, age, and sex information that listeners use (Blumstein & Munos, 2005), and receivers discount calls from unreliable callers and respond more strongly to noisy, degraded, or multi-caller signals (Blumstein et al., 2004). Marmots calibrate vigilance behavior and FID to vegetation height (pub 1490), predator urine cues (pub 1570), group size pub 810, and recent weather, with vigilance rising after rainy weeks (Bobb et al., 2025) and FID shrinking on warm days (Sanchez et al., 2025). Where humans are frequent, marmots habituate over years, allocating more time to vigilance but tolerating closer approaches pub 439.
Early work in the 1990s established the social, genetic, and acoustic architecture of marmot life. Studies since 2010 added a sophisticated social-network and quantitative-genetic toolkit, and research since 2020 has shifted toward partitioning the heritable basis of behavior, testing multilevel selection, and asking how climate and human pressures jointly reshape fitness. Recent animal-model analyses have shown that FID is modestly heritable (Scurka et al., 2025), that the propensity to alarm-call is heritable in both natural and trap contexts (Blumstein et al., 2025), and that even the acoustic noisiness of a fear call has a genetic component (Blumstein et al., 2025). The nonlinearity and fear hypothesis, which links chaotic vocal features to high-arousal states, now connects social isolation, parasite infection, and glucocorticoid stress to call structure (Blumstein, 2025).
New work also blurs the boundary between individual and group as the unit of selection. Philson and colleagues found that group breakability and individual closeness both predict fitness components (Philson et al., 2025), while a separate study suggests that animals in more reciprocal groups may perceive greater security and reduce vigilance (Philson et al., 2025). Comparative dispersal studies on co-occurring golden-mantled ground squirrels (Nguyen et al., 2025) and FID work on chipmunks and ground squirrels along disturbance gradients (Mikaru, 2025) are extending the Gothic-based framework to other Gunnison Basin mammals.
Major unknowns remain about how marmots and their neighbors will fare as winters shorten and summers grow more variable. How will the opposing trends of improving summer survival and declining winter survival balance out across colonies of different elevations and quality? Why are strong affiliative ties costly to longevity in this system when sociality typically enhances fitness elsewhere, and how do antagonistic multilevel selection pressures on individuals versus groups resolve over time? What roles do early-life adversity, parasite load, and the social microbiome play in shaping adult stress, personality, and reproductive success? And as recreation along Gothic's roads and trails intensifies, can long-term habituation studies separate behavioral flexibility from heritable change in flight responses? Answering these questions will require continued integration of decade-spanning mark-recapture, quantitative genetics, acoustic analysis, and comparative work across mountain sciurids.
Armitage, K. (1981). Sociality as a life-history tactic of ground squirrels. Oecologia. →
Blakely (2025). Is social plasticity good? Does lifetime social variation enhance LRS and longevity in yellow-bellied marmots? →
Blumstein, D. (2025). Nonlinear phenomena in marmot alarm calls: a mechanism encoding fear? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. →
Blumstein, D. (2025). Society formation and maintenance in yellow-bellied marmots. Animal Behaviour. →
Blumstein, D., & Armitage, K. (1997). Alarm calling in yellow-bellied marmots: I. The meaning of situationally variable alarm calls. Animal Behaviour. →
Blumstein, D., & Armitage, K. (1997). Does sociality drive the evolution of communicative complexity? A comparative test with ground-dwelling sciurid alarm calls. American Naturalist. →
Blumstein, D., & Munos, O. (2005). Individual, age and sex-specific information is contained in yellow-bellied marmot alarm calls. Animal Behaviour. →
Blumstein, D., et al. (2004). Reliability and the adaptive utility of discrimination among alarm callers. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B. →
Blumstein, D., et al. (2025). Is the propensity to alarm-call heritable and related across multiple contexts? Animal Behaviour. →
Blumstein, D., et al. (2025). The sound of fear is heritable. Current Zoology. →
Bobb, et al. (2025). Does rainfall or temperature influence antipredator vigilance in a hibernating mammal? Behavioral Ecology. →
Contrasting effects of climate change on seasonal survival of a hibernating mammal (2020). →
Downhower, J., & Armitage, K. (1971). The yellow-bellied marmot and the evolution of polygamy. American Naturalist. →
Habituation or sensitization? Long-term responses of yellow-bellied marmots to human disturbance (2021). →
Ickin, et al. (2025). Comparative life-cycle analyses reveal interacting climatic and biotic drivers of population responses to climate change. PNAS Nexus. →
Koenig, W., et al. (1996). Detectability, philopatry, and the distribution of dispersal distances in vertebrates. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. →
Mikaru (2025). Assessing anthropogenic effects on golden-mantled ground squirrel and least chipmunk flight initiation distances. →
Nguyen, et al. (2025). Dispersal of the golden-mantled ground squirrel (Callospermophilus lateralis). Journal of Mammalogy. →
Olfactory predator discrimination in yellow-bellied marmots (2008). →
Ozgul, A., et al. (2010). Coupled dynamics of body mass and population growth in response to environmental change. Nature. →
Peripheral obstructions influence marmot vigilance (2009). →
Philson, et al. (2025). Multilevel selection on individual and group social behaviour in the wild. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. →
Philson, et al. (2025). Social security: individuals in socially reciprocal groups may perceive security from predators. Behavioral Ecology. →
Sanchez, et al. (2025). Climatic variation and risk assessment in a highly seasonal mammal. Current Zoology. →
Schwartz, O., & Armitage, K. (1980). Genetic variation in social mammals: the marmot model. Science. →
Scurka, et al. (2025). The heritability of fear: decomposing sources of variation in marmot flight initiation distance. Animal Behaviour. →
Social attributes and associated performance measures in marmots (2012). →
Social security: are socially connected individuals less vigilant? (2017). →
Strong social relationships are associated with decreased longevity (2018). →
Van Vuren, D., & Armitage, K. (1994). Survival of dispersing and philopatric yellow-bellied marmots: what is the cost of dispersal? Oikos. →
Wey, T., & Blumstein, D. (2010). Social cohesion in yellow-bellied marmots is established through age and kin structuring. Animal Behaviour. →
Wey, T., et al. (2008). Social network analysis of animal behaviour: a promising tool for the study of sociality. Animal Behaviour. →
Demographic models that project population dynamics using continuous size or stage distributions
Time allocation to scanning for predators versus other activities like foraging, measured through specific postures and head orientations
Random environmental variation that affects demographic parameters across all individuals in a population simultaneously
Experimental technique using recorded sounds played back to animals to test behavioral or physiological responses to acoustic stimuli
Effects of human recreational activities on wildlife communities through habitat alteration, disturbance, and behavioral changes
The degree to which individuals can be discriminated from one another based on their vocalizations, quantified using information theory
tendency of an organism to stay in or habitually return to a particular area
The movement away from your place of birth and onto another location involving decision to depart, displacement, and settlement
Process by which animals become less responsive to repeated non-threatening stimuli over time
Human activities that impose novel challenges on a wide range of species, which can negatively influence individuals, populations, and communities as ...
Social systems where individuals have flexibility in their social behaviors and group membership rather than being obligately social
Network statistics that quantify the importance or influence of individuals within social networks, including degree, closeness, betweenness, and eige...
Natural selection that favors behaviors that benefit relatives, even at a cost to the individual performing the behavior
Correlations between multiple repeatable, individually distinct behaviors that form consistent behavioral patterns across situations
Probability of surviving the summer active season, measured by last sighting dates relative to seasonal cutoffs
A within-individual process caused by deterioration in molecular and physiological function resulting in a decrease in survival probability and reprod...
Reduction in reproductive output of individuals due to presence of other conspecifics, particularly older or dominant individuals
Measure of an animal's physical state, often assessed through body mass relative to size
The hypothesis that animals allocate less time to antipredator vigilance as a function of increasing numbers of animals foraging together
Mating system where males compete with one another over access to matelines consisting of groups of related females
Reduced fitness in inbred individuals compared to outbred individuals due to expression of deleterious recessive alleles
Consistent individual differences in behaviour across time and contexts, concept known as animal personality, behavioural types, temperament or coping...
Behavioral observation method where a single individual is observed continuously for a fixed time period
A method to test for phylogenetic signal by comparing empirical data variance to variance from randomly reshuffled species identities across trait dat...
Metabolites of stress hormones measured in fecal samples as a proxy for physiological stress levels
Individual's reaction to being trapped and handled, measured on behavioral scale from aggressive to passive responses
Individuals in more tightly connected social groups perceive greater security from predators and allocate less time to antipredator vigilance while fo...
The allocation of time among different activities that determines overall energy expenditure patterns
Cortisol and glucocorticoids that help regulate energy balance in animals and could determine dispersal behavior under stressful conditions
Ratio of neutrophil to lymphocyte white blood cell counts used as a measure of immune response activity
Signals that meet criteria of stimulus-class specificity and contextual independence, where alarm calls are said to be functionally referential when t...
Statistical approach that includes individual identity as a random effect linked to a pedigree to estimate additive genetic variance
Social ranking system based on agonistic interactions where some individuals consistently dominate others
Directed aggression toward conspecifics, increasing spatial distancing from or decreasing huddling with unfamiliar conspecifics
The average number of offspring produced by a typical individual during its life, calculated as the product of offspring number and survival probabili...
The age at which females first reproduce, an important component of vertebrate life histories with effects on individual fitness and population dynami...
Mortality from roadkill events where animals are struck and killed by vehicles
Statistical measure of repeatability that tests individual consistency of a continuous variable by comparing within-subject and between-subject variat...
A method to partition variance in population growth rate into contributions arising from temporal covariances of demographic parameters at different t...
Variation in behavioral expression within individuals across time or contexts
Experimental provision of additional food resources to wild populations to test resource limitation hypotheses
Social organization where related females remain together and males typically disperse
Individual's reaction to a non-novel, risky situation
The likelihood that an individual survives from one time period to the next
Ability of organisms to compensate for poor early-life conditions through increased feeding or altered resource allocation later in life
Scaled measure of how population growth rate responds to changes in environmental drivers
Situations where time spent on one activity reduces time available for other activities
Growth pattern characterized by an initial period of mass gain followed by stabilization before hibernation entry
Mass gain patterns in young animals during their first active season before hibernation
Plasticity that occurs across generations where parental environmental effects influence offspring phenotype or fitness
Fitness benefits that include both direct fitness (individual's own reproductive success) and indirect fitness (fitness gained by helping relatives re...
The duration of continuous engagement in a particular behavioral activity
Hypothesis that highly aroused animals produce nonlinear vocalizations because they lose control of their larynx over vocal fold production apparatus
Nature-based tourism activities that can provide conservation benefits but may also impact wildlife behavior through human presence
Positive social interactions and bonds between individuals including behaviors like grooming, playing, and proximity maintenance
Specialization of left and right brain hemispheres to carry out specific activities, with right hemisphere processing threats and left hemisphere proc...
Communication through sound production that requires receivers to detect and discern between distinct acoustic signals
Behavior in which a female moves her litter to a new location
The concept that signal production and structure depend on an individual's health status and condition
Statistical technique used to classify observations into predefined groups based on multiple variables
The degree to which an individual is integrated in their group based on the number of independent links to others in the group
The correlation between different demographic parameters (survival, reproduction, productivity) measured across the same time periods within a populat...
The proportion of male versus female offspring in a litter affecting prenatal hormone exposure
Explains how acoustic signal structure is shaped by habitat-driven selection that enhances the propagation of relatively undegraded vocalizations
Ecological research projects that follow individuals or systems over extended periods, often spanning decades
The area traversed by an individual in its normal activities of food gathering, mating and caring for young
Attenuation and degradation of sound over distance due to atmospheric absorption, ground attenuation, signal scattering, and deflection by layered sur...
Measure of how noisy or random a sound is, with pure tones having entropy values approaching negative infinity
Communication between the central and enteric nervous systems as a potential mechanism for microbiome-behavior relationships
The distance between the anus and the genital papilla, used as a non-invasive measure of prenatal exposure to sex steroid hormones
A method for calculating dominance based on an individual's relative number of wins or losses that is tolerant of missing pair-wise interactions and w...
An aversion to novel stimuli, measured as latency to touch the puzzle box from stepping onto the platform
Measure of the level of inbreeding within a population, with values close to 1.0 indicating high levels of inbreeding
Assumes that antipredator adaptations evolve together and thus prey may respond to extinct predators as long as they have experience with other predat...
The hypothesis that the more an individual interacts with others, the less likely they are to disperse
Behavioral and physiological mechanisms whereby group-living animals share body heat to reduce thermoregulatory costs
The evolutionary processes leading to the development of multiple distinct call types in animal communication systems
Demographic metric based on information theory quantifying the variation in social group composition across age and sex classes
A capture-recapture model that accounts for transitions between different states (e.g., age classes) and estimates state-specific survival and detecti...
The hypothesis that play provides an opportunity to practice and refine skills that will be needed later in adulthood
The process by which female mammals that develop in male-biased litters show signs of masculinization because they are exposed to testosterone produce...
Predator recognition abilities that do not require prior learning or experience with predators but are based on innate or genetically-determined respo...
Winter survival strategy of some small mammals that may affect their vulnerability to avalanche disturbance depending on burrow depth and emergence ti...
Social organization where individuals aggregate in groups, potentially providing antipredator benefits through collective vigilance and dilution effec...
Correlation between behavioral traits at the individual level, estimated while controlling for within-individual variation and environmental effects
Maximum running speed of an individual measured during chase trials
Number of social ties that if cut will result in two or more separate networks, measuring group fragmentation
High diversity of life-history traits among individuals within populations, potentially masking life-history trade-offs
Proportional increase in body mass during the active growing season, calculated as August 15 body mass divided by June 1 body mass
Hypothesis that populations may be buffered from adverse climatic effects when vital rates with high impacts on population growth exhibit the least te...
Pattern where male mammals tend to travel farther than females in exploratory excursions and disperse more than females
Infection by internal parasites including blood-borne trypanosomes and intestinal parasites that can affect host behavior and physiology
Changes in social behavior and group dynamics that result from variation in the number of individuals in a social group
Improvement in population fitness through the introduction of new genetic material
Physiological and behavioral adaptations to minimize energy expenditure
The combining of information from multiple sensory modalities that influences decision-making
A measure of how well acoustic signals maintain their structure when transmitted through different environments
A survivorship pattern where approximately constant proportions of individuals survive through each age class
Measures the proportion of relationships within a group where both individuals initiate interactions with each other, indicating mutual social relatio...
The idea that individuals of different age-sex categories contribute differently to social structure and cohesion
The angle between the paths of predator and prey to the prey's refuge, expressing degree to which prey must run towards an approaching predator
When animals prefer to associate with certain individuals over others within a group
Learning that occurs through observation or interaction with other individuals
Litters where offspring are sired by more than one male
Computational model that simulates individual organisms and their life histories to understand population-level patterns
When any social group contains 2 or more males with neither male forced to leave the group because of conflict
The ability to devise a novel solution to a novel or existing problem, measured as successful opening of puzzle box
Risk-taking behavior calculated from flight initiation distance to a simulated predator approach
The practice of making research data publicly available for verification and reuse
Unequal distribution of reproduction among group members, with some individuals having much higher reproductive success than others
Statistical model allowing phenotypic correlations between traits to vary continuously with environmental predictors
The proportion of variance in a trait that is explained by individual identity, indicating consistency of individual differences over time and across ...
Behavioral tendency to investigate novel environments, measured through open-field tests
Internal biological timing system that maintains rhythmicity in a wide range of behavioral, physiological, and metabolic processes
A measure of the variety of behaviors an individual uses, calculated using Shannon index across different behavioral categories during problem-solving...
The relationship between the microbiome and sociality in animals
An individual's development from egg to adult
An analytical approach where deviations from an individual's average behavior or phenotype are calculated to quantify and analyze how an individual's ...
Behavioral test using mirror exposure to gauge shy and bold behavior through observed interactions with reflection
Scientific discipline focused on protecting and preserving species and ecosystems
Individuals participate in seemingly altruistic behaviors because they have reciprocal relationships and take turns
Classification of female reproductive phase as gestation/lactation or post-reproductive/pre-hibernation
Theoretical framework examining trade-offs between advantages and disadvantages of group living
The probability of detecting a species given that it is present at a site
Organization of individuals within populations based on family groups and territorial patterns
The mean age of females when they lay eggs or give birth, calculated as the inverse of the sum of elasticities of population growth rate to changes in...
Extension of the Lande-Arnold selection analysis using partial regression to partition selection among levels
Combined direct visual observation during peak activity periods with motion-activated camera bucket traps to determine species presence/absence in mea...
Camera traps deployed along trails in a stratified random design to detect wildlife presence and estimate occupancy while accounting for detection pro...
Standard live-trapping protocol using Longworth traps in grid arrays for mark-recapture population estimation of small mammals with individual marking...
Intensive monitoring of juvenile emergence and movements using daily visual observations and grid-based distance calculations to characterize dispersa...
Statistical method using continuous two-phase models to identify the age at which body mass growth stabilizes at adult levels in golden-mantled ground...
Blood collection and analysis to determine neutrophil and lymphocyte counts for calculating neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratios as a measure of immune res...
Linear mixed effect models to estimate individual body mass at key seasonal transition points, accounting for day-of-year effects and random variation...
Field playback experiments testing Mule deer responses to predator and control vocalizations. Single observer approached focal deer, conducted pre- an...
Individual animals are uniquely marked and tracked through capture-recapture over multiple decades to estimate survival, reproduction, and productivit...
Mixed-effects modeling approach to partition phenotypic variance into genetic and environmental components using pedigree information and repeated mea...
Controlled experiments testing marmots' ability to distinguish between individuals using acoustic and olfactory cues to assess recognition capabilitie...
Use of remote sensing data to determine snowmelt timing and map marmot colony boundaries. Combines satellite imagery analysis with ground-truthed colo...
Bayesian statistical approach to simultaneously estimate individual lifetime means and variances in social traits from longitudinal data. Controls for...
Controlled feeding experiment providing different protein levels of horse feed to different matrilines while maintaining reference populations. Tests ...
Principal component analysis applied across multiple species using demographic traits to identify major axes of life-history variation and test for sl...
Systematic measurement of microhabitat features including vegetation height, cover, and structural elements like perches within a standardized 7×7-m g...
Standardized 4-minute test immediately following open field test where a mirror is revealed to measure sociability and aggressive responses toward con...
Systematic predator monitoring during behavioral observations to quantify predation pressure. Creates predation index by dividing predator counts by o...
Assessment of female reproductive success through behavioral observation of pup emergence from natal burrows and pedigree analysis to assign offspring...
RASTER-based spatial analysis to quantify multiple metrics of anthropogenic disturbance including distance to infrastructure and proportion of impervi...
Live-trapping of marmots to assess docility through standardized behavioral responses during capture and handling, including alarm calling propensity ...
Deployment of novel puzzle boxes with multiple solution pathways to test problem-solving ability and innovation in wild animals. Video recorded trials...
Colony sites are visited daily starting April 19th each year to record the first emergence date of individual marmots from hibernation through direct ...
A standard comparative method that controls for evolutionary relationships among species by analyzing evolutionary changes along phylogenetic branches...
Mathematical method for calculating relative dominance ranks from pairwise interaction outcomes that is tolerant of missing data and accounts for grou...
Statistical modeling of capture-recapture data to estimate seasonal survival probabilities across age classes using program MARK with model selection ...
Calculation of individual animal home ranges using 95% minimum convex polygons from location data, with specific criteria for minimum observation requ...
Semi-parametric survival analysis using Cox proportional hazard models to test effects of maternal, social, and environmental covariates on annual sur...
RNA extraction from blood samples, library preparation, and high-throughput sequencing on Illumina platforms followed by read mapping and differential...
Frequent visits to wild meerkat groups to record births, deaths, emigration, and social status changes over 20 years of continuous observation.
Measurement of anogenital distance using dial or digital callipers to 1mm accuracy as a proxy for prenatal testosterone exposure and masculinization. ...
Weekly counts of visitors at a facility to create a traffic volume index as a proxy for vehicle traffic on nearby roads during peak visitation periods...
Construction and parameterization of periodic matrix population models to project population dynamics under different scenarios of environmental perio...
Monte Carlo simulation comparing observed reproductive pair relatedness to expected relatedness under random mating to test for inbreeding avoidance.
Construction of genealogies from long-term observational data and estimation of coefficients of relatedness using Hamilton's method with assumptions a...
Integration of molecular phylogeny with life history and energetic data to identify evolutionary patterns of energy conservation traits across marmot ...
Blood collection from trapped wild marmots via femoral vein puncture during routine handling for long-term population studies. Sera separated and froz...
Simultaneous measurement of oxygen consumption, body temperature, and conductance in marmots entering torpor to determine mechanisms of metabolic depr...
Standardized literature search and screening process to identify and synthesize studies on hibernating mammal responses to climate change, followed by...
Statistical analysis of stream chemistry data transformed to compositional units using PCA to evaluate spatial and temporal trends while removing effe...
This data file contains a matrix of genetic kinship for the 43 individual marmots analyzed in this study. Kinship was calculated as pair-wise relatedn...
<p>These data continue and expand upon data collected by Kenneth B. Armitage titled, " Social Behavior and Population Dynamics of Yellow-bellied Marmo...
This data file contains trait information concerning the 43 individual marmots, or their blood samples (one per individual), analyzed in this study. M...
Pruned pedigree including only individuals with docility data and their ancestors.
This table contains 37 years of demographic data for 12 sites. The trap record for each animal for each year the animal was present includes age, sex,...
This table contains 36 years of trapping data. Up to 12 sites were studied annually within the vicinity of Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Color...
The gut microbiome has a well-documented relationship with host fitness. Greater microbial diversity and abundance of specific microbes have been asso...
Individuals are generally predicted to avoid inbreeding because of detrimental fitness effects. However, several recent studies have shown that limi...
How phenotypes are shaped by multilevel selection – the theoretical framework proposing natural selection occurs at more than one level of biological ...
FILE DESCRIPTION Keywords: American badger, dates of capture, age of victims, Gunnison's prairie dogs Filename = Fig 6.1, Dates of capture and ages of...
Between-individual variation in phenotypes within a population is the basis of evolution. However, evolutionary and behavioural ecologists have mainly...
Data including docility scores, trial number (scaled), day of the year (scaled), time of the day (0: AM; 1:PM), age (0:juveniles, 1: yearlings; 2:adul...
Code as implemented in the paper "Transient LTRE analysis reveals the demographic and trait mediated processes that buffer population growth"
For social animals, group social structure has important consequences for disease and information spread. While prior studies showed individual connec...
FILE DESCRIPTION Keywords: Gunnison's prairie dog, Colony sizes and colony compositions by year File name = Fig 11.1, Top right, GPDs, Colony sizes an...
Multiple unlinked genetic loci often provide a more comprehensive picture of evolutionary history than any single gene can, but analyzing multigene da...
FILE DESCRIPTION File name = Fig 4.1, Gunnison uterine litter size vs litter size at first juvenile emergence, 19 Sept 2025. These data used for Fig 4...
Animals are often confronted with potentially informative stimuli from a variety of sensory modalities. While there is a large proximate literature de...