Life on Rainier
Sandi Doughton, The News Tribune
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)
