Know your marmots. (Or, please donate to PBS.)

The following is a repost from my older private blog dated August 6, 2007. I know talk of groundhogs is typically over by now, however I had a similar disturbing conversation today on my commute home, and felt an urge to spread the word or at least make it search engine friendly. — E.

This morning my bus buddy didn’t know that woodchucks are groundhogs, then expressed doubt about this most true fact, and then going even farther, insisted that woodchucks are beavers. (Reasoning: beavers “eat” wood therefore, woodchuck.) This turned into a really dividing debate between our fellow riders. I’ve never been so astounded by a conversation in my life. Beavers = woodchucks? “They’re like really big rabbits,” someone contributed. “Right, and those things you get in pet stores. The rabbits without ears. Only in the wild they’re much bigger, like how it is with pet mice and real mice,” added another. I’m still completely rattled by the morning’s commute. I always figured animals were the most universally interesting part of biology so that ought to be the part of science class that sunk in, at least a bit, right? For a while I thought I was being punked, but no. They resolved to Google it and settle the matter tomorrow. Maybe next week we can come to a consensus on how magnets work.

So just a PSA, in case you were in the bathroom smokin’ up during that bio class (apparently the one day I wasn’t) it goes like this:

• Kingdom Animalia
• Phylum Chordata
• Class Mammalia
• Order Rodentia
• Family Sciuridae (ground squirrels — our friend the beaver is in family Castoridae)
• Tribe Marmotini (where the marmots, prairie dogs, gophers, and spiny and palm squirrels part ways)
• Genus Marmota (marmots, tarvagas, Tibetan snow pigs — no lie)

Marmots are ground squirrels that mostly live in mountainous regions, in burrows, are highly social and unlike most other members of Sciuridae, they communicate by whistling. Other than size and habitat, the main differences between groundhogs and the rest of the marmots that have “marmot” in their common names are that they live in low-laying areas instead of rockier mountain regions, and their ability to predict the weather they have their own holiday.

So you can call a groundhog a marmot, and you won’t be wrong. You can also call it a woodchuck or a whistlepig (except hoary marmots are also called whistlepigs, and thanks to AA Milne, gophers are saddled with whistly-lisps in pop culture and over the years acquired the nickname in some areas – so it’s not very specific). And apparently you could call them “land beavers” but I think that’s straddling the boundary of acceptable artistic license, and I wish you wouldn’t.

I’ve made some very scientific visuals for comparison, to spare you the ookiness of doing an image search for “beaver”. Beavers have webbed feet and scaly, paddle-shaped tails (Figure 1). As you can see from Figure 2, groundhogs have cutewiddlefuzzy tails and enjoy posing for pictures.

Why do I know all this about marmots? In 1997 I had to write a paper on colony behavior changes in hoary marmot populations during food shortages. I can understand not knowing what a marmot is, especially if you don’t live in common marmot areas. They all pretty much look alike if your only experience with them is in their roadkill stage of development. And I can totally see someone confusing gophers with groundhogs, since they look so much alike too. But with a beaver? Really?

I wonder what my bus friends would think if they were faced with a capybara.