Hefty Marmots

Yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado are gaining weight and producing more offspring compared to thirty years ago. The difference is attributed to climate change.
In the Rocky Mountains, these marmots usually hibernateĀ  for seven to eight months of the year, which make the summer months "a very busy time for them," Arpat Ozgul, of the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London and lead author of the new paper, said in a prepared statement. "They have to eat and gain weight, get pregnant, produce offspring and get ready to hibernate again."

But as the Colorado summers have grown longer, so too has the time the marmots have to do all of these thingsā€”and do them better. This extra preparation (and reproduction) time means that "they are more likely to succeed and survive," said Ozgul, whose results were published online July 21 in the journal Nature (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group).

As the marmots grow bigger, other species are not doing as well. The number of tall bluebells and tenacious wolverines has declined. Link -via Dave Barry's Blog

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Have Colorado summers really grown so long? I haven't noticed that summer is longer where I live. Are they now considering October to be summer month there now?
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Animals destined only to his passion and create a balance of the food chain.
But if talking about the greedy, I'd rather remember the human. What is not eaten? From grass to swallow fleas. Though - they've given a reasonable mind.
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I once encountered a marmot sunning his belly at Old Faithful. I called him a fool. Ten feet away were the remains of a moose.

Coincidence?
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