Here’s an interesting fact about marmots. They’re surprisingly strong. That’s what McKenna Sanchez discovered when she came to RMBL in 2022 through the NSF Research Experience for Undergraduate (REU) program. 

She worked on Dr. Dan Blumstein’s Marmot Project, observing the mammals’ behavior as well as taking blood and hair samples, cheek swabs, and measurements, and tagging them if needed. Like most REU students, McKenna did an individual project and paper. 

Her project focused on summer survival and flight initiation distance, a measure of how long it takes a marmot to flee from a perceived predator (human). In other words, it’s how close a researcher can get to a marmot before it runs for its life. 

After graduation, McKenna came back to RMBL in 2023 as a research assistant with the Marmot Project. Again, she focused on flight initiation distance, but she added another variable: climate. Her team calculated rainfall, air temperatures, and the length of the snow year to see if climate change influenced flight behavior. 

What the team found is intriguing. When temperatures rose, marmots let researchers come closer before fleeing. One theory for why is that, being alpine dwellers, they don’t tolerate heat well. It could be that the slower-to-respond animals were under thermal stress, which affected their decision-making. 

Researchers made the observation using the Marmot Project’s 63-year-old dataset to, so the theory has merit.  

McKenna says that one of the best things she got at RMBL was field experience. Before she arrived, she expected to be assisting graduate students doing all the work. On the contrary, her experience was decisively hands-on. She hadn’t expected that she would struggle with a large, feisty squirrel to keep it calm as it was prodded and measured. 

By the end of the season, McKenna felt confident with the whole process. It begins with a marmot-sized trap, baited with peanut butter and horse feed, and sometimes salt as they crave salty foods. After the animal triggers the trap door, researchers carefully open and cover the end with a reinforced, cone-shaped bag. The bag resembles a burrow, so with luck, the marmot will climb in, and the darkness helps it calm down. 

The bag has several Velcro straps that researchers open one at a time to access various parts of the marmot — nose and mouth, legs, feet, genital area, and so on. If it’s a lactating female, the team knows to keep an eye out for pups. 

Some marmots become wary of the traps by the end of summer. Others, not so much. Enticed by the fortified peanut butter, they get trapped repeatedly. McKenna calls them trap happy. Pups are easy, too. They’re curious about everything. 

Today, McKenna works for the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies, where she leads guided hikes in the Aspen and Snowmass areas, including the Zieglar Reservoir fossil site, where from 2011–2012, paleontologists and volunteers excavated more than 5,000 Ice Age fossils. 

At RMBL, McKenna added to the long-term Marmot Project database. Surrounded by people whose passion for the natural world matched her own, she thrived with the encouragement she got from scientists. 

Now, she inspires tourists — some with no previous experience with nature — to interact with the natural world, even to become citizen scientists. 

This is the power of one undergraduate’s experience with RMBL. The lab hosts 40 every year. 

-Article written by RMBL contributor, Carol St. George

McKenna Sanchez Bio: McKenna graduated from Texas A&M University in 2023 with a degree in Ecology and Conservation Biology. Since graduating, she has been part of multiple wildlife biology projects working with birds and mammals. She recently switched her work focus to science communication and takes people on nature hikes as a guide for Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. When she’s not working, you can find her hiking, skiing, reading, or baking. 

Photo Credit: McKenna Sanchez