This post is part of the LTER’s Short Stories About Long-Term Research (SSALTER) Blog, a graduate student driven blog about research, life in the field, and more. For more information, including submission guidelines, see lternet.edu/SSALTER
by Alec Chiono
I spend most of my time at the Niwot Ridge LTER on my hands and knees marking and measuring individuals of the plant species northern rockjasmine (Androsace septentrionalis). Alpine ecosystems are often known for topographic heterogeneity (differences in landscapes over small spatial scales) which drives microclimatic variation (differences in climate over small spatial scales). I am tracking the timing and magnitude of the growth, reproduction, and mortality of this rockjasmine (i.e. its life history) to understand how microclimatic differences drive differences in life history. This work can help us both test long-standing theories about the evolution of plant life histories and better understand how environmental change could drive ecological and evolutionary changes for alpine plants.
Credit: Alec Chiono, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Despite being a proud plant evolutionary ecologist, I must admit that the first memories that come to mind when someone asks about field work at Niwot Ridge usually involve animals. During my first field season, a grazing juvenile elk came above treeline near a research plot and began loping around the alpine tundra. Two years ago, a coyote would bark at me while I walked out to and back from my field sites. Last year, I stumbled upon some unimaginably cute white-tailed ptarmigan chicks who posed confidently for my camera. There are of course the moose and pika sightings, the plentiful songbirds I hear and watch, and the pocket gophers who burrow through my transects. However, my favorite and most common encounters are with yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer).
Credit: Alec Chiono, CC BY-SA 4.0.
If you brought up marmots to most Niwot researchers, you would almost certainly be met with groans of frustration and stories of things the marmots have destroyed — inflatable boats, electrical wiring, plastic totes. Marmots have even made defunct a rod that was used to study lightning strikes, and they now inhabit the structure the rod was built upon. I’ve had my share of climate loggers destroyed by their plastic-chewing prowess, but I’m always happy to see those massive rodents. If you are not surprised to learn that marmots are rodents, you may be surprised to learn that they are technically ground squirrels, being the largest members of the squirrel family. Like other ground squirrels, they live in burrows, and, due to their penchant for occupying rocky, high-elevation habitats, they are also known as rockchucks.
One day, I was visited by a marmot while surveying one of my sites. At first, I assumed they were just waiting for an opportunity to dig through my backpack while I had my back turned. After giving them plenty of opportunity to do so, my backpack remained uninspected. Eventually, I had to assume that they were only interested in sunbathing and watching me work. We ate lunch together, or rather, I ate lunch while they continued to watch me, then I moved on to another site and have unfortunately not been visited by them again.
Credit: Alec Chiono, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Another encounter involved an overnight stay on Niwot Ridge, which is not common. This is mainly due to the existence of conveniently close lodging down the mountain, though some researchers would also cite the requirement that you sleep inside the Tundra Lab, which is scented by our compost toilet, as a reason for not staying overnight. However, sometimes longer field days are needed, and I found myself with that need one field season. As the sun was setting, I walked down the ridge from my field site to the Tundra Lab. Sunset on the Ridge with a cloudless evening is a special experience, a sentiment I think the marmots agree with. Though marmot-sightings are common, I see at most a handful each day and often none. This evening, I passed dozens, maybe hundreds, of marmots, all standing on their hindlegs, seemingly watching the sun set behind the peaks that straddle the continental divide. Although I was already appreciating that evening, their calm attention prompted me to stand still with them and watch the sun fully disappear.
Marmots have the reputation for being nuisances, and of course sometimes they are, but my experiences with them inspire a more complex opinion. For both of these stories, I have no idea what these animals were really doing, what was really going on in their heads. Though I felt some sort of kinship with them, they may have just been warily keeping an eye on me. That lack of understanding is the inspiration for me. It is easy sometimes to think that the evolutionary and ecological processes I am interested in capture the full complexity of the organisms I study, yet I doubt there’s a model that can explain why that marmot hung out with me for a few hours or what those marmots were doing watching the sunset. The life history theory I study is firmly rooted in a perspective that tries to understand how organisms can optimally time life events to maximize reproductive output, and though this can provide some understanding, it can also smooth over the ways living things don’t act like thoroughly rational reproductive machines. These marmots serve as a reminder to me to step back from this optimization-focused perspective and pay more attention to how organisms actually act than to how I think they should act.
Alec Chiono is a PhD candidate in Nancy Emery’s lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. He conducts his research at the Niwot Ridge LTER, where he studies plant life history evolution and how political landscapes shape how we conduct science.
