Perils of the Big Snooze

There are over 280 recognised species of squirrel, only a little over a half of which spend any significant time up trees; the others include an array of more or less ground-dwelling species, from chipmunks to susliks. They live in almost every terrestrial habitat imaginable, from tropical rainforest to semi-desert. One of the few habitats they don't live in is, unsurprisingly, polar ice cap, but, even then, there's one group of squirrels that at least gets sort of close.

These are the fifteen species of marmot (Marmota spp.), most of which inhabit mountainous regions, often above the tree line. Marmots are the largest of all squirrels, being at least twice the weight of, say, prairie dogs. However, the weight of marmots isn't necessarily the easiest thing to quantify, because it changes so much over the course of the year, which is in turn due to their need to bulk up before entering hibernation. And the reason for hibernation in marmots? Well, that brings us back to the crappy habitat.

First, Find Your Marmot

Rodents are, on the whole, small animals, with mice, voles, and squirrels being among the most familiar examples. Yet, even within those families, much larger animals also exist. In the mouse family, of course, there are the rats, some of which are, indeed, rodents of unusual size. The largest of the squirrels, on the other hand, are the marmots.

Marmots, of course, are ground squirrels, not the tree-dwelling sort, and their closest relatives include animals like prairie dogs, along with assorted other species across the Northern Hemisphere. They are, for the most part, mountain-dwelling species, with the groundhog of Canada and the eastern US being a well-known exception. Groundhogs, like other North American species, and, for that matter, the Alpine marmot of Europe, are a well studied species, about which we know a fair bit. The various species found across Asia - and there are at least six - are generally less well-known.

News in Brief #3

The Mandrill's Face

There are a number of colourful primates, but one of the more instantly recognisable is surely the mandrill (Mandrillus sphinx) whose adult males have strikingly blue and red faces. Under a strict definition, mandrills aren't really baboons, but they're very closely related to them, and the difference is pretty academic. Given that only the adult males have these extreme face-markings it's not surprising to learn that they are there mainly to advertise their masculinity and fitness as a potential father to female mandrills.

A study from 2005 confirmed that, yes, indeed, female mandrills find males with bright red noses to be particularly sexy. Oddly, though, until now nobody appears to have looked at what the bright blue patches on either side of the nose are for. In the new study, Julien Renoult and co-workers confirmed that the blue colour is more intense in dominant males, just as the red is. Indeed, it seems that what's really important is the contrast between the two. This suggests that, in the distant past, mandrills developed the red nose as a measure of their fitness, and the redder the nose, the more females liked them. So the noses of dominant males became ever redder... but there's only so red a nose can get. When some males began to develop a contrasting colour elsewhere on the snouts, the redness of their noses became more obvious, and, over the course of evolution, the bright blue/red contrast we see now developed.