Biscuits and marmot-friendly weather contributing to Vancouver Island marmot baby boom

It had been one year since he last spoke to The Discourse about the “ridiculously cute” Vancouver Island marmots, who also happen to be Canada’s most endangered mammal.

The Marmot Recovery Foundation is a charity founded in 1999 as a response to growing calls from many scientists and community members for more action to stop the creature’s extinction. The organization’s mission is to recover the wild population of Vancouver Island marmots.

This time, Taylor was speaking to The Discourse about a scale that Vancouver Island University (VIU) technicians developed to help investigate marmot body weight, survival and the number of pups female marmots wean.

The scale is exciting news in itself as it will support data collection to learn how much supplemental feeding helps the marmots. But Taylor had something else to talk about that Thursday morning.

“Just this morning, we released our annual report. A big part of that report is that we counted 381 marmots in the wild — more than has ever been recorded for this species in the past,” he said.

“There’s been a real impact. We started with fewer than 30 — we could find 22 in the wild in 2003. So it’s certainly exciting for us to see these numbers… We’re pretty over the moon.”

Many of the marmots counted in 2024 are still pups.

“A lot of those are very young marmots, and like all wildlife, young don’t have the same survival rate as adults,” he said. “It’s not the end of recovery efforts, but it’s a moment to celebrate.”

A line graph in the latest Marmot Recovery Foundation annual report shows a sharp spike in recent wild-living marmot counts over the last year. The wild marmot population went from 303 in 2023 to 381 in 2024. Screenshot/Marmot Recovery Foundation

Marmot population was likely much higher

Taylor emphasized that prior to colonization, there were certainly more marmots, but the 381 reflects the most since settler researchers began collecting data 45 years ago.

“We know populations used to be much higher, but unfortunately at the moment we don’t have a really good model for what the historical population was,” Taylor said. “But we know from First Nations’ traditional use of marmots that the population must have been much, much higher than it is today.”

For example, an area within ‘Namgis Traditional Territory on northern Vancouver Island near what is now referred to as Schoen Lake Provincial Park was known as Papikatan, which roughly translates to “Place of Marmot,” the Marmot Recovery Foundation website states.

Currently, K’ómoks First Nation is collaborating with the Marmot Recovery Foundation to identify high-elevation archaeological sites in Strathcona Provincial Park. More information about this co-management program can be found in the video from a lecture held last September: Management of the Subalpine: Archaeology and the Vancouver Island Marmot.

Boom supported by weather and supplemental feeding

Taylor said there have been a number of factors that have helped these little rodents succeed.

"We’ve had fantastic weather from a marmot perspective for the past two years,” he said. “In the short term, marmots want weather that provides lots of growing vegetation to eat.”

The past two seasons have had a long growing season in the alpine, providing lots of forage for the marmots. He added that long-term conditions are important too. The alpine environment with the snow is what creates marmot meadows.

“So now we cross our fingers and hope that continues. And try to build on what we’ve seen the last two years with this species, try to keep that momentum going as much as we can.”

Another factor that may help contribute to the creature’s success is a supplemental feeding program, which is what led to the decision to make the marmot scale.

Researchers go weigh out to learn about the marmots

Over a decade ago, the Marmot Recovery Foundation started a supplemental feeding program using leaf-eater biscuits, a type of biscuit formulated for animals who typically eat leaves as part of their diet.

“We would put out these leaf biscuits in the earlier part of the year as the marmots were emerging from hibernation. There were a bunch of reasons for us to do that. In other endangered species, supplemental feeding has been shown to have some benefits.”

Taylor said he and others involved in the supplemental feeding program noticed some anecdotal evidence: The marmots accessing the leaf biscuits were having more litters and more pups than expected.

“It just kept surprising us, how many pups they were having.”

So the recovery foundation continued with the feeding program and noticed the female marmot’s reproductive capacity seemed to be tied to body condition.

“The idea was that they could benefit from this food and it would potentially get them to produce more pups,” Taylor said.

But he said it’s important to be cautious with anecdotal evidence. Other factors may be contributing to the female marmot’s success in weaning.

“Maybe there’s some other variable that was going on that we weren’t considering… A big part of the problem is that we’re dealing with a really small sample size,” he said. “There’s literally a few hundred Vancouver Island marmots on the landscape.”

The foundation partnered with the Wilder Institute and two technicians from VIU to build an electronic weigh scale to continue to research the impact of marmot body weight on reproductive success and survival.

“So the question becomes: are the marmots benefiting from the food? Is their body condition improved, and are they producing more pups? But to measure body condition, you can’t assess that visually. You just have to weigh the marmot.”

Before the remote weigh scale, weighing marmots meant handling them, weighing them and then releasing them, Taylor explained.

Marmots are trap-shy, which is actually good because they need to be cautious in the wild. Handling them means their natural behaviour is interrupted, he added.

So the recovery foundation and the two VIU technicians spent two years developing a remote, electronic scale to weigh the marmots.

These scales are light enough to be carried up into the subalpine environment, but robust enough to survive the elements.

The researchers behind the scales are engineering technician Devin Ayotte and resource management and protection technician Michael Lester. Lester built the scale and Ayotte was behind the modifications, which included a way to identify the marmots as they weigh them and adding a way to store the data remotely for collecting for field researchers.

After several attempts, the two came up with a lightweight scale built of aluminum and plastic with a wooden top, instead of an earlier version that was metal.

“[Marmots] didn’t seem to like the bright, shiny surface,” Ayotte said in a news release from VIU.

“It’s going to be a really good tool to collect an important piece of biometric information from the marmots while minimizing our impact on the marmots themselves,” Taylor said.

“This is a science-based program, and it’s really important that we challenge our anecdotal assumptions and observations. We need to be constantly assessing whether or not we’re seeing things that we think we’re seeing, and [asking ourselves if] there are other things driving these changes.”

“There’s no room for error with this species, right? They are still a critically endangered species.”

Taylor said after the snow melts and the recovery foundation can access the alpine meadows where the marmots live, they will hike up with the scales and place them in the area.

‘We can recover even the most critically endangered species’

Taylor added that this work cannot be done alone: 75 per cent of the foundation’s money comes from public donations.

“Literally, this species would be extinct today without that support. So I always want to say thank you and to make sure people realize the impact that their support has had.”

Taylor said working in conservation can be really hard, and other programs are not doing as well as the marmots.

The Northern spotted owl recovery program, for example, is in a similar place to where the marmot program was when recovery efforts began, and Taylor said the owls released into the wild have not done that well.

But seeing success stories like the marmot recovery is helpful to other conservation efforts.

“It’s really important to know that we can recover even the most critically endangered species,” he said.

“It’s not easy, it’s not quick, but it is possible. And we shouldn’t be giving up hope for those species, confining them to extinction just because it’s difficult. It’s possible to recover them if you’re willing to put in the time, effort and work.”