MARMOTS
Sprawled on sun-warmed rocks or cramming their mouths with wildflowers, Mount Rainier's marmots appear to lead a bucolic existence. But those chubby cheeks belie a seething melodrama.

For the buck-toothed rodents, every summer is a life-or-death race to pack on enough fat to sustain them through winter.

Add to that the stress of family and neighborhood life: mating, child-rearing, snooping, philandering, fighting off fellow philanderers. And then there are the coyotes, eagles and foxes ready to pounce in an unguarded moment.

"It's sort of like 'Days of Our Lives' or some other soap opera," said Daniel Blumstein of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, who has studied marmots around the world. "There's always a crisis."

Marmots are good subjects for scientists who specialize in animal behavior. They are active during the day and pay little heed to humans with clipboards. They have the convenient habit of hibernating during the academic year. And while all marmots - from woodchucks to groundhogs to the "gold ants" of Pakistan - look similar, their societies vary widely.

Some species practice incest, infidelity and infanticide. Many are nurturing, cooperative and surprisingly unselfish - risking themselves for the good of the family group.

"They're doing rather complicated things - whether they know it or not," said David Barash, perhaps the world's top marmot expert. The University of Washington psychology professor started studying marmots in the 1960s to test the then-radical notion that social behavior is as much a product of evolution as sharp beaks in woodpeckers or thick, white fur in arctic foxes.

What Barash found was a neat correlation between the kinds of places marmots live and the ways they interact with one another.

North America's temperate lowlands are inhabited by woodchucks, a solitary breed that doesn't welcome company. Even babies are kicked out to fend for themselves a few weeks after birth.

At high altitudes, like at Mount Rainier, marmots are social creatures. They live in tight-knit groups of up to 20, often comprising a male, two females and several years' worth of youngsters. The adults guard the colony, using whistles and calls to warn of threats. During hibernation, the colony huddles together for warmth.

The differences, Barash believes, are environmental adaptations. Where summers are long and winters mild, marmots can survive on their own. At Rainier, the animals must pull together to raise young and make it through the short summers and harsh winters.

"The colony provides social support, a family network," he said.

Cooperative living can have its costs.

A marmot sentry that spots an eagle and sounds an alarm whistle is shining a spotlight on himself.

"You're more at risk than if you ... just went quietly into your burrow and let the other guys suffer the consequences of their ignorance," Barash said.

The evolutionary explanation is that the genetic payoff comes in protecting your kin - and being protected yourself.

Other marmot behaviors that might make good genetic sense can be jarring to humans, who anthropomorphize the creatures as cuddly and sweet. In some species, males that take over a colony will kill their predecessor's offspring. Young marmots in the European Alps often mate with their mothers. At Rainier, Barash observed what he calls "gallivanting": a tendency by males to mate on the sly with females in other colonies.

"There's a trade-off, though," he said. "While you're off gallivanting, others can gallivant with your females."

The species on Mount Rainier is called the hoary marmot, for its gray-tipped, or hoary, fur.

If they were named for their dominant activity, they would be called the chow hounds. "They're like a vacuum cleaner," Barash said.

From the time they emerge from their burrows in May until they waddle back underground in late September, hoaries double their weight by gorging on flowers and grasses.

That fat is what will keep them alive for the next seven to eight months.

During hibernation, the animals' body temperatures drop to just above freezing. They breathe two to four times each minute, and their heart rates drop to less than one-tenth of normal. Still, many don't weather the winter, even clustered together 8 feet below ground. If their fat stores run out, they starve. If the snow isn't deep enough to provide insulation, they freeze.

When the survivors emerge in the spring, their memories are not impaired in the least by their long slumber. They can precisely recall the layout of their burrow network, which can be up to 50 feet long.

"They have a remarkable 'map' sense. I've seen them emerge from the hibernaculum, walk across snow 10 feet deep and dig straight down to a burrow entrance," Barash said.

"They have a lot more intelligence than people think."

PRIMORDIAL FORESTS
The forests are the first feature to welcome the visitor to Mount Rainier. Like cool water enveloping a diver, an ancient, emerald universe embraces you upon crossing the boundary into the national park.

Immense firs crowd the roadway, their trunks girdled with moss, their crowns branching out 20 stories above. Devil's club grows as tall as a bull elk, sharing the forest floor with pungent skunk cabbage, vine maple and fountain-like ferns. Dusty shafts of sunlight pierce the thicket.

Gone are any hints of the clearcuts, tree plantations and rustic communities that encircle the park. Rainier's forests are primordial - a remnant of the vast tangles of old growth that once stretched like an evergreen sea from the Cascade Range to the shores of Puget Sound.

"Sometimes, when I'm walking down a street in Seattle, I'll flash on a scene like this," said Park Service biologist Daniel George, picking his way over a latticework of giant fallen trees in the Carbon River Valley. Every surface of the ground below is crowded with plant life. Hemlock saplings sprout from crumbling nurse logs.

"This is what it all used to look like. Seattle. Tacoma. All of it."

By the simple fact of their preservation, Rainier's forests are some of the region's most spectacular. By virtue of the mountain's steep gradient, they encompass an uncommon range of climatic zones.

Nearly 10,000 acres of old-growth forests drape the peak's lower extremities, like the brocade hem of a monarch's robe. These expanses include Alaska yellow cedars up to 1,200 years old. Groves of Douglas fir and Western red cedars have been growing for 500 to 1,000 years.

Perhaps the most esteemed of the ancients took root on the park's east side centuries before Columbus sailed. The Grove of the Patriarchs occupies an island in the Ohanapecosh River -Êa lucky spot long shielded from wildfire and the waterway's erosive meanderings. Visitors trek to the towering cedars, hemlock and firs, circling the trees and running their hands across the weathered bark.

Rainier's rich web of life is anchored in its old-growth forests. From winter wrens to pine martens to long-toed salamanders, nearly 70 species of birds, 30 kinds of mammals and 17 amphibians and reptiles live in the many niches provided by these complex plant communities. More than 40 species, including northern spotted owls and marbled murrelets, require old growth to survive.

Higher up the mountain, Douglas fir and cedar yield to noble and silver firs. Strong and elegant, they withstand significant snowpack, colder temperatures and a shorter growing season. Their branches are short and stiff to bear up under heavy snow loads. Their profiles are peaked, to shed as much snow as possible.

At about 7,000 feet, the alpine world comes to an abrupt halt. Above that, it's too cold for trees to grow. But below that line, a hearty mix of species fringes Rainier's famous meadows and marches up its exposed ridge lines.

Exquisitely adapted, these trees can handle weather that would wither garden varieties. With its tall, rocket-like silhouette, the subalpine fir can stand up to 20 feet of snow without collapsing. Mountain hemlock and white-bark pine cope by crouching down - they can fan their lower branches and contort in a configuration called krummholz, or twisted wood. Buried by snow in the winter, their low profile protects delicate needles from the abrasive blasts of wind-driven ice.

Most of the highest-elevation trees have a natural antifreeze to shield against occasional sub-zero nights during the brief growing season. To survive the winter, though, their only option is to switch off all growth and lapse into a kind of hibernation.

A subalpine fir with a foot-wide trunk can be 400 to 600 years old.

These high-altitude forests are also Rainier's most changeable.

Over the past 70 years, the subalpine forests have encroached into what were once open meadows. Scientists attribute this to warmer winters and smaller snowpacks.

But Rainier's ancient, lowland forests offer a remarkable lesson in the stability and persistence of mature ecosystems.

Jerry Franklin, a forestry professor at the University of Washington, has been studying Rainier's forests for 20 years and visiting them since he was a child.

"When I go back to the places I went as a boy, they have the same feel, the same overall gestalt," he said.

Old trees die and new trees are born, but the forest itself can remain constant for centuries - putting the lie, Franklin said, to arguments that human intervention is necessary to keep forests vigorous.

"These forests just go on and on and on," he said. "They have a lot to teach us."

WILDFLOWERS
Mount Rainier's star attraction is its lush, subalpine meadows. Visitors throng to Paradise each summer when the knee-deep greenery explodes into bloom. Buttercups, anemones, larkspur and lupines splash the slopes like strokes from an impressionist's paintbrush. John Muir was so dazzled he described the scene as "the lower gardens of Eden."

The famed naturalist had little to say about the rock-covered pitch above the meadows, and many modern visitors are equally unimpressed. They often ignore signs asking them to stay on the trail, instead dislodging rocks and treading on the scrubby plants to get a better view or snap a group portrait.

"Why wouldn't they?" botanist Ola Edwards asks. "It doesn't look like anything."

Unless you look with a discerning eye, adds Edwards, who did the pioneering studies on Rainier's alpine plants two decades ago.

The vegetation at the mountain's higher reaches possesses a subtle and rugged beauty. It takes a special toughness to survive in a place where the growing season is a scant three months, water is scarce and desiccating winds scour the ground.

Alpine plants adapt by miniaturizing and maintaining a low profile. In moist, lowland meadows, lupines can grow hip-high. In their alpine incarnation, their stems barely clear the surface and their leaves are as tiny as dolls' hands. Other species, like phlox and partridgefoot, grow in low cushions or mats.

To prevent water loss, leaves are often reduced to needles, or sheathed in a thick, waxy coat. Some plants are covered with insulating fuzz. Heathers, one of the major alpine plants, harbor fungi on their roots that help them extract nutrients from the poor, volcanic soil.

All of the species depend on the heavy winter snows to shield them from the sub-zero air and provide moisture in the spring. In the mountain's fell-fields - the stone-strewn slopes stretching up to 11,000 feet - the plants have also evolved an absolute reliance on the rocks. Each stone creates a minute patch of moisture and shade where seeds can sprout and tiny plants take root. When the rocks are stripped away, the seeds bake dry. Any plants that gain a foothold are washed away by the meltwater or dislodged by needles of frost.

The plants grow slowly. A heather an inch across can be eight to 10 years old. Some of Rainier's large heather clumps may be among the planet's oldest living things. Edwards used volcanic ash layers and carbon-dating to estimate that some may have been growing for up to 10,000 years.

When summer finally arrives, alpine plants have just weeks to grow, flower and set seed before fall's chill slows their progress. "People talk about alpine plants being fragile, but they're very, very tough in many ways," Edwards said.

What they are not adaptable to are things outside their evolutionary experience. Species that can survive seven years under snow can be crushed beyond recovery by a careless footstep. Spots where campers cleared the rocks 20 years ago remain largely devoid of vegetation today. Erosion scars where hikers have cut switchbacks will never heal on their own.

Every year, the national park staff raises and plants thousands of alpine seedlings to help undo the damage done by past and present visitors. The work is especially important because true alpine habitat is rare in the Northwest. Most is concentrated on Rainier, and many of the 150 species found there have few other options for existence.

"It's unique," Edwards said. "We have this place for plants and animals to live that we don't have anyplace else in the Northwest."

HIGH-ALTITUDE INSECTS
The perpetual snowfields of Mount Rainier bear little evidence of life.

The ridges that split the white expanses harbor few plants. No tree can root, and the wind-lashed slopes offer scant protection from the killing cold.

Yet even here, the mountain is alive.

Under the rocks and snow dwells a community of creatures impervious to temperatures that would make popsicles of most living things.

They are insects, mostly, including a handful of beetle species, daddy longlegs and a rare breed of bugs called grylloblattids (grillo-BLAT-ids).

This invertebrate society exists thanks to one of the world's most bizarre buffets: a bounty of flies, ants, aphids and scores of other tiny animals that waft through the air.

"They really shouldn't be there at all, but they're living on this vast tonnage of insects delivered by the wind," says John Edwards, who has researched the high-altitude ecosystem for 30 years. On any midsummer's day, he estimates, Rainier is littered with 20,000 pounds of nutritious bug debris.

The victims are primarily insects that disperse through the air - a common strategy in species that pump out zillions of offspring.

"If they happen to be unfortunate enough to land on the snow, they get too cold to flap their wings and take off," Edwards said.

During the day, birds feast on the flotsam. Most of the invertebrate scavengers don't come out until it gets dark.

"If they sally forth in the day, a bird'll pop them off," Edwards said.

He uncovered the insects' stealthy lifestyle by camping out on the snowfields and wandering around at night with flashlight and headlamp.

The daddy longlegs, or harvestmen, are the first to emerge, about half an hour after dark.

"It's amazing to me to see these long-legged creatures trundling over the snow," Edwards said.

Though harvestmen look like spiders, they are not. They also are not venomous, but excellent predators and first-class scavengers.

The beetles and grylloblattids emerge as the night deepens.

To Edwards, the latter are "the pride and joy" of Rainier - its rarest and most singular inhabitants.

The last insect order to be discovered, grylloblattids mostly occupy habitat too hostile for their tenderer brethren. Wingless and flattened like cockroaches, they look like a cross between an earwig and a cricket.

For bug collectors, a grylloblattid is as coveted as a Mark McGwire home run ball. "They're very hard to find. One is worth 1,000 other species," Edwards said. Rainier's grylloblattids are exquisitely adapted. At 6 degrees below freezing, they die from the cold; warmed by a human hand, they go into heat convulsions.

Some of the mountain's other arthropods spike their bodily fluids with natural antifreeze and chemicals that inhibit ice crystal formation.

The animals' small stature is advantageous, too. They are able to squeeze between rocks and into crevices, where temperatures can be warmer than the subfreezing air above. In winter, the snow layer insulates the insects sleeping below.

The ice worm, another of Rainier's odder occupants, makes its home within the snow.

Between the crystals of ice is a thin layer of water. The worms spend their entire lives swimming in this liquid. Dark red and thread-like, they swarm to the surface in the late afternoons and feed on bacteria and wind-borne pollen. Edwards and his children once counted 500 worms on a square yard of snow.

Warmed much above the freezing point, their bodies break down and turn to soup -Êa lesson Edwards learned when he first tried to transport some to his laboratory.

Springtails, a type of small, jumping insect sometimes called snow fleas, live and breed year-round in leaf litter on the floor of lower-elevation forests around the mountain. Even when the litter is blanketed by several feet of snow, the fleas thrive. They can breed so rapidly that exploding populations boil to the surface.

"You can find hordes, quart-sized masses of them," said Rod Crawford of The Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington. If they are not picked off by predators - especially spiders - the tiny purple creatures scatter across the snow and burrow back down to safety and warmth.

Other cold-weather insects, like wingless crane flies, must abandon the security of their sub-snow hideaways to mate.

"About an hour after dark, they come up through holes in the snow around the trunks of shrubs and little trees," Crawford said. Their dark bodies and spider-like silhouettes stand out against the stark whiteness, making it easier to spot an attractive prospect.

With their unparalleled ability to carve out a living in tiny, specialized niches, invertebrates - particularly insects -Êare the clear leaders in Earth's evolutionary race. At any given moment, invertebrates account for more than 99 percent of the individual animals alive on the planet.

Scientists have identified about 1 million types of insects, and estimate that there may be more than 10 times as many still unnamed. (Mammals account for a paltry 8,000 species.) All of the planet's land surfaces - except the poles and the highest mountain peaks - are inhabited by insects and their relatives.

So it is no surprise that the animal kingdom's altitude champs are small, crawling creatures.

Edwards discovered what he believes to be Rainier's highest full-time animal residents on Cathedral Rocks, at about 11,000 feet: A species of wolf spider and a type of harvestman.

The highest elevation animal ever discovered was also a spider - found 22,000 feet above sea level on Mount Everest.

(Published 1999)