Studying pika welfare in the La Sal Mountains
A research project funded with a Wild Animal Initiative grant
An America pika (Ochotona princeps). Photos by Johanna Varner.
November 22, 2024
Ecologist Johanna Varner wakes at dawn, just in time to observe sun rays hitting the red rock desert in a colorful explosion of light. Since 2018, she’s camped in the rugged La Sal Mountains near Moab, Utah, each August to study an isolated population of American pikas (Ochotona princeps).
“The La Sals are one of the most beautiful study sites I’ve ever been to,” says Johanna, an associate professor of biology at Colorado Mesa University and a Wild Animal Initiative grantee. “You’re camping in the forest next to these beautiful alpine meadows, and you have to get up early, because the pikas are most active in the morning.”
Johanna has studied this population of pikas for several years. On her most recent visit to the study site, she re-sighted a pika she’d marked as an adult five years earlier.
“The world was a different place in 2018 for us humans, but that whole time she’d been up here, living out life,” Johanna says.
But little is known about what that life is like, and how the pikas in that area are faring in response to environmental pressures such as introduced species and climate change. With grant funding from Wild Animal Initiative, Johanna and PhD student Mallory Lambert will study individual pikas and track their welfare over time to better understand how the pikas’ environment affects their well-being. Mallory will also study introduced mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) along with the pikas to determine the nature of interactions between the two species.
About the study
Pikas look like “a guinea pig and a potato had a baby,” as Johanna describes them. “They’re cute and round and fluffy, but they can be pretty fierce about defending their space. If one pika enters another pika’s territory, they can get grabbed by the scruff of the neck and thrown down on the rocks.”
Rather than hibernating or migrating like other alpine residents, pikas spend their summers building enormous caches of food to last them through the winter months. The potato-sized pikas amass haypiles that weigh 65-75 pounds. For humans, Johanna says, this would be the equivalent of 25,000 pounds of food, gathered from about 5,000 trips to the grocery store.
Pikas have experienced population declines in some parts of their range, but they appear more resilient in other places. One hypothesis suggests that at lower elevations in isolated mountain ranges like the La Sals, rising daytime temperatures give heat-sensitive pikas smaller windows of time to collect food in the morning and evening, which reduces their ability to build sufficiently large haypiles. This could lead to declines in welfare, due to starvation or malnutrition. With her study, Johanna seeks greater clarity on the complex ecological forces at work and hopes to find out how this unique population is faring overall.
Since Johanna has marked and observed pikas in the La Sals for the past six years, she and her students have pre-existing data on survival and longevity that will support the new data they plan to gather. To assess welfare going forward, Johanna and her team will mark individual pikas with unique colored ear tags. She will collect scat to measure stress hormones, and she’ll perform assessments of each pika’s body condition, parasite load, and body mass. Year over year, Johanna and her team will return to observe the pikas and monitor annual survival.
Mallory, a graduate student collaborating with Johanna, will tackle another interesting question related to this alpine environment: What impact, if any, do introduced mountain goats have on pikas? State wildlife management agencies have brought wild mountain goats to Utah and Colorado for sport hunting, but it’s unclear how these newcomers affect native plants and animals.
Ecological interactions are an important aspect of welfare, “but first we have to know if there is even an interaction happening, and whether that interaction affects the pikas,” Johanna points out.
Johanna says she’s grateful for Wild Animal Initiative’s support, and she’s excited to think this work could help wild pikas live better lives. Seeing the pika she’d tagged in 2018 brought tears to her eyes. That pika had survived so much adversity year after year, successfully collecting food and likely having litters of babies.
“In some respects, it really puts my problems in perspective,” she says. “I find it really inspiring.”