Global Warming is Causing Squirrels to Get Fatter

AOL Weird News – Some squirrels are getting a lot plumper than they used to be, but the root cause of their weight gain isn’t what you might suspect (not saturated-fatty nuts, sorry!): It’s global warming.

That’s the conclusion drawn in a three-decade-long study on the yellow-bellied marmots — large ground squirrels also known as rock chucks — that inhabit the Upper East River Valley in Colorado, the results of which are in the latest issue of the journal Nature. It’s reportedly the first time that climate change has been linked to physical changes in an animal population.

The study’s authors — researchers from the U.S. and the U.K. — observed that as the summers in their 2-mile-high territory in the Rockies got longer over time, the marmots became heavier by about a pound. But…why?

“The researchers found that marmots are waking up from hibernation around 21 days earlier now,” Discovery News explains. Less time hibernating means more time spent scrounging for and consuming food — which can include grains, fruit and bugs. In addition, as an article accompanying the Nature story notes: “The marmots may, for example, have changed what they eat, not just the length of time in which they eat.”

The longer summers also mean more time for love: The population of marmots has tripled in the last decade alone, passing their heft onto their offspring, which in turn have more time to grow even larger thanks to the shorter hibernation period.

Ironically, unlike humans, fatter marmots are actually fitter too: The team found that the marmots’ mortality rate had declined substantially over the period of the study. However, before you start to worry about “super marmots” reproducing out of control and taking over the world, remember that the grand global warming experiment continues and the end result is far from certain.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE ABOUT THE FAT SQUIRRELS

Al Gore has gone too far.

Quit trying to scare us and force us to believe in some global warning by throwing fat squirrels in our face. First off, no one wants a bunch of fat squirrels running around. The more fat squirrels out there, the more difficult it will be to find a nut. Well, it might not be difficult to find a nut, because you know a fat squirrel out there has one. But, try stripping a nut from a fat squirrel. I’m not trying to strip a nut from a fat squirrel. You’ll get you hand bit off. I’m not trying to get my hand bit off.

Now perspect this for a second. There are people who walk the earth and live and breathe normal air everyday whose everyday jobs are to figure out if the squirrels in Colorado are getting fatter because of global warming or because they are eating too many trans fats and not running on the treadmill enough.