A fuzzy fat father who likes the taste of rocks is officially the most popular yellow-bellied marmot in Gothic, Colo.
When the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory held its inaugural Fat Marmot Week this summer, the contest was twofold — a popular vote, and a weigh-in to see which contestant packed on the most pounds ahead of hibernation season.
According to his online bio, he is known for fathering several litters of baby marmots, and licking the salt and minerals off of rocks. He nearly doubled his body weight this summer from 2.5 to 5.9 kilograms, or roughly 5.5 to 13 pounds.
"He definitely deserved it," Fat Marmot Week organizer Katie Adler told As It Happens host Nil Kӧksal. "He is a special boy who likes to eat rocks."
But heavy is the head that wears the crown. As champion chonker, Dawn has also taken on the unofficial role of ambassador for the Marmot Project, a long-term research program whose future hangs in the balance amid widespread science and education funding cuts in the U.S.
Fat Marmot Week is inspired by Fat Bear Week, a popular contest run by Alaska's Katmai National Park and Preserve.
Like bears, marmots are hibernators, and soon, Gothic's population of yellow-bellied marmots will tuck themselves away for an eight-week winter rest.
"They have to put on all that weight so that they don't freeze over the winter," Adler said. "So they get absolutely huge."
Adler, a graduate student in ecology at the University of California, Los Angeles, works for the Marmot Project, a long-term generational study of yellow-bellied marmots out of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado.
Launched in 1962, it is the world's second longest-running study of individually marked mammals, after Jane Goodall's famous chimpanzee research in Tanzania.
Over the last six decades, its researchers have studied 5,000 marmots over 12 generations, says University of Ottawa biologist Julien Martin, one of the Marmot Project's leaders.
"From a human perspective, it would be kind of going back, in terms of generations, to the beginning of the 1700s," Martin said.
"In parallel, we are also tracking the environment. So what we're doing is we're trying to understand how, essentially, the wild animal of nature is adapting and evolving with the changes in the climate and all the perturbations that humans are bringing."
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