Marmot mysteries: Team goes extra mile to learn more

Ask anyone who has hiked in Glacier National Park if they've seen a marmot and the answer is probably yes.

Hoary marmots are a common sight in Glacier and in many of Montana's mountain ranges, but relatively little is known about the animals.

"They're familiar to everyone, but they haven't been studied that much," said Dr. Steven Kalinowski, professor of ecology at Montana State University.

A research team at MSU, in partnership with Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, is working to change that.

FWP biologist John Vore started studying marmots in the 1990s.

"I've always had an interest in marmots," said Vore, who now works as game management bureau chief for FWP. "I like them because of where they live. ... They're just really neat little animals."

In Montana, hoary marmots are typically found above 6,500 feet.

"They're alpine obligates, meaning they only live up in the alpine," he said.

The places hoary marmots live are hard to access. They live high in the mountains where snow covers the ground most of the year. That's likely part of why few studies have been done on the animals.

"They're a species that we don't know a lot about as far as their distribution or numbers on the landscape," Vore added.

While working in the field as an FWP biologist, Vore began to document where he saw hoary marmots.

"I started paying attention and logging where I found marmot colonies," he said.

A few years ago, MSU joined his efforts.

One of the big questions MSU researchers aim to answer is how interconnected are the marmot colonies found throughout Montana's mountain ranges?

Researchers are looking at the high alpine areas where marmots live as islands in the sky, explained Dr. Andrea Litt, professor of ecology at MSU.

"Can they move from island to island?" she asked.

If they can't and marmot colonies are isolated, are the animals interbreeding?

Marmots are potentially a species of concern because little is known about their range or their population numbers, said Ben Turnock, an MSU master's student who is working on the marmot research project.

"We know that in Glacier they're a permanent resident," he said.

However, in other areas are they also permanent or do colonies ever disappear?

Turnock also wants to know how far marmots can and do travel. Can the Glacier population cross Highway 2? Is the North Fork Flathead River a physical boundary for them?

"Can a marmot swim across something like that?" he asked.

To answer those questions, Turnock, along with three field technicians, spent last summer traveling to high mountain areas and trapping marmots. He'll do the same thing this summer.

The crew uses live traps to capture the animals. Once the marmots are in the traps, they use a capture bag to securely hold the animal while they take about 1 millimeter of tissue from the marmots' ear.

"We're collecting small tissue samples," Turnock said.

Those tissue samples will be used for DNA testing, which will help determine how interconnected marmots are throughout Montana.

While trapping marmots, the crew also works to gain a better understanding of the habitat marmots prefer.

Marmots seem to live in large boulder fields with large boulders. It seems that having meadows nearby is also important.

"We think they're doing a lot of their foraging in those areas," Turnock said.

The crew is also trying to determine what kind of access to water marmots need. In many alpine areas, streams don't flow year-round.

The marmots that can often be seen on Great Falls' golf courses or along the Missouri are yellow bellied marmots.

"Hoary marmots are a different beast than the yellow bellied marmots," Vore said.

Hoary marmots can be found all the way from Alaska to Montana. Montana is the southern edge of their range. Typically, they're not seen south of the Beaverhead Mountains, and usually aren't found east of the Continental Divide.

"There are a few on the east side of the Divide, but the don't get very far on the east side of the Divide," Vore said.

Researching marmots is challenging work.

"It's hard to get to some of these places," Litt said.

Last summer, Turnock and his crew spent 53 days in the backcountry.

"Over those 53 days, we hiked 215 miles," he said.

They also climbed 89,000 feet of elevation.

Trapping marmots proved more challenging that Turnock expected.

"It was harder than we had anticipated," he said.

In the first month of trapping marmots, they only captured three animals. In the last month, they got 10 marmots.

"We got a lot better," Turnock said.

In all, the researchers have collected 20 tissue samples from 20 different marmots in four different mountain ranges. They'll continue their efforts this summer and begin DNA sequencing this fall.

By the end of the project, researchers hope to have tissue samples from marmots in Glacier, the Whitefish Range, and the Mission, Swan, Anaconda-Pintler and Bitterroot mountains.

One of the goals of the research is also to develop a protocol to use in order to monitor marmots long term.

As a Ph.D. candidate, Kalinowski worked on a similar project working to study bighorn sheep. It used to be thought that separate mountain ranges had isolated populations of bighorn sheep and that the animals didn't travel between herds.

DNA proved that to be wrong.

"It really changed how people looked at bighorns," Kalinowski said.

The marmot research has the potential to be equally impactful.

Erin Madison is the outdoors writer at the Great Falls Tribune. She can be reached at 406-791-1466 or emadison@greatfallstribune.com. Follow her on Twitter @GFTrib_EMadison.