Alpine marmot
Marmota marmota
— Where the name comes from
Marmota goes back to the late Latin marmota, which most linguists derive from mus montanus, “mountain mouse”, through Alpine dialect forms such as murmont and marmontana. The epithet marmota repeats the genus, following the tautonymic formula Linnaeus used for type species. The Italian common name follows the same root, and preserves the memory of when it was regarded simply as a large high-altitude rodent. Some have proposed an onomatopoeic origin tied to the alarm whistle, but that is a later and weaker idea.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Rodents
- Habitat
- Alpine grassland and high pasture above the treeline
- Range
- The Alps, Carpathians, Tatras and Upper Austria, with introduced populations in the Pyrenees, the Massif Central and the Apennines
- Size
- 42–54 cm of body plus 13–16 cm of tail, 3–7 kg depending on the season
- Diet
- Herbivore — alpine grasses, shoots, flowers and roots
- Lifespan
- 15–18 years in the wild
— Characteristics
- 01
It spends up to six months a year in hibernation, in deep burrows sealed with earth and hay.
- 02
The alarm whistle is modulated: a repeated sound signals a ground predator, a single one a raptor overhead.
- 03
It lives in family colonies where the young of earlier litters stay on to help their parents.
— What sets it apart
During hibernation the marmot’s body temperature falls to around 5 degrees and the heart slows to a few dozen beats a minute, but the animal does not sleep straight through: it wakes every two or three weeks for short spells, burning in those few hours much of the fat laid down over the summer. The young of the year survive the cold because the adults curl around them in the nest chamber, giving up their own heat. It is one of the rare forms of social hibernation known among mammals: under the snow, the family is the blanket.
