Cool Critters: Forget the groundhog – we’ve got yellow-bellied marmots

Pennsylvania’s Punxsutawney Phil may be the world’s most famous groundhog, but he has a cousin in the Inland Northwest who deserves his own day in the sun. And not because he makes scientifically bonkers weather forecasts based on his shadow.
Groundhogs don’t live in our region, but yellow-bellied marmots do. And in case you didn’t notice, they live in the shadow of their groundhog cousins.
But these rodents with tummies the color of buttered toast are special in their own right. Not only are they cute, social and quirky, but they’re full of scientific surprises.
Groundhogs and marmots are members of the squirrel family. Both species have stout bodies, big front teeth, brown fur and large, bushy tails. So how to identify a yellow-bellied marmot? Surprise! – by its yellow belly, along with a whitish streak between the eyes.
Lewis and Clark documented seeing these strange rodents for the first time in 1805 along Idaho’s Lemhi River.
“There is a reason Lewis and Clark and pioneers had never seen yellow-bellied marmots before – they are only found west of the Great Plains,” the Idaho Department of Fish and Game explains on its website.
Three marmot species live in the Evergreen State, said Jeff Bradley, mammalogy collections manager of the Burke Museum in Seattle. They are the Olympic marmot, found on the Olympic Peninsula; the hoary marmot, which lives in the Cascades; and the yellow-bellied marmot, which inhabits mostly the eastern side of the state.
“Personally, I think marmots are beautiful,” said Bradley, a self-professed marmot enthusiast, adding that they are “basically enormous ground squirrels with inquisitive facial features and a bit of personality.”
About that personality. Unlike groundhogs that tend to be solitary and territorial, yellow-bellied marmots are increasingly at home in urban areas. What’s more, they seem perfectly comfortable around human neighbors.
In fact, so many marmots moved into the Spokane area in recent years that a team of Gonzaga University researchers looked into how an animal typically found in rural areas is faring in the city. Their findings, published in the journal Conservation Physiology in 2018, suggest that yellow-bellied marmots are “urban adaptors” – not just surviving but also thriving near hiking trails, railroad tracks and campuses located close to the Spokane River. Stressful? Not at all.
And while marmots can’t tell us if we’ll have six more weeks of winter, they can tell us about changes in the climate. In a 2010 study published in the journal Nature, scientists concluded that warmer springtime temperatures in Colorado were spurring the rodents to emerge from hibernation earlier. After tracking yellow-bellied marmots during a span of 32 years, University of California-Los Angeles researchers determined the animals were emerging from their burrows about a month earlier than they did in 1976.
Perhaps the biggest scientific surprise about yellow-bellied marmots is that they tap the fountain of youth. During the seven to eight months they spend hibernating in their burrows, they barely age, a team of biologists concluded in a 2022 study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution. At a cellular level, researchers found, the marmots are nearly the same as when they curled up and went to sleep in the fall. These findings may explain why their average life span of 15 years is considerably longer than similar animal species.
“Our results from different statistical approaches reveal that epigenetic aging essentially stalls during hibernation,” lead author Gabriela Pinhothey said in a UCLA news release.
Does this mean a super-long sleep is all it takes to fend off aging? That’s only part of it. Researchers theorize that the marmots’ abilities are linked to metabolic changes that occur when the mammals are in deep hibernation.
Earlier Sunday, Punxsutawney Phil squinted at daylight among men in top hats, news cameras and 30,000 spectators. Meanwhile, the yellow-bellied marmot snoozed soundly and without fanfare. Just think, this chisel-toothed critter nestled in his hidey hole possesses an ability that humans have long strived to acquire: to delay life’s wear and tear, naturally and humbly.