Vancouver Island marmots can be a little shy when it comes to revealing their weight.
After two years of work, technicians and researchers with Vancouver Island University and the Wilder Institute are ready to deploy their latest version of an outdoor scale this summer to assess the health of the critically endangered species and determine if larger marmots have more babies.
鈥淏ody condition is a good indicator for survival, but also, perhaps more importantly, it can increase the fecundity of the females, so they can have maybe more pups in a litter,鈥� said Mike Lester, a technician in the faculty of science and technology at the university.
鈥淎nd if there鈥檚 just a very small increase in the average litter size, that might be the difference between the marmots on a decline or rescuing the species from extinction.鈥�
The scale is part of a study looking into the benefits of providing the wild marmots with calorie-dense biscuits near their wintering shelter to see if extra food boosts their body weight as well as their reproduction.
But putting a scale in the alpine that can survive outdoors and be sat on by a house-cat-sized marmot is not a simple task.
Earlier versions of the scale have had shiny aluminum or were plastic, in the name of keeping them waterproof, but the marmots weren鈥檛 always a fan.
鈥淭hey weren鈥檛 too sure about the feeling of that. It鈥檚 quite alien to them. So, now this iteration is going back to wood. Like a plywood surface, wooden that feels a bit more natural,鈥� Lester said.
Early research also relied on cameras on tripods to take pictures of the animals on the scales so staff could go through the footage and identify which one was being weighed. But those cameras would sometimes tip or roll down a hill.
In this new version, technician Devin Ayotte has outfitted the scale with technology that reads a chip implanted in each captive-bred marmot to identify them and store data when they step on the scale.
鈥淭he marmots aren鈥檛 going to co-operate with us and assume the position when they climb up on top of the scale. So, we need something that can read reliably at a greater distance than the off-the-shelf solutions we found,鈥� Ayotte said.
The population of Vancouver Island marmots once dipped as low as 30 but has rebounded to at least 300 individuals in the last two decades.
Lester says marmots have been on the island since the last ice age, but their numbers went into a steep decline for many reasons, including climate change.
鈥淏ringing that back is important, because they鈥檙e part of the ecosystem in the alpine here. It鈥檚 almost like a keystone species, because they turn over the soil, they provide habitat for other animals. They provide prey, secondary prey species, for things like cougars and eagles,鈥� he said.
鈥淭hey鈥檙e an integral part of it, and we鈥檝e been the cause of their decline. So, I think it鈥檚 important that we try to recover that species and try and undo the harms that we鈥檝e done.鈥�
