Nature is out of sync—and reshaping everything, everywhere

Each spring marmots rise from their winter slumber. They mate, give birth, and spend summers chowing down before they hibernate again. “It’s get fat or die,” Conner Philson, a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, told me as he held Anchor in a dark Kevlar bag so the animal couldn’t slice a finger with his huge incisors. After she ran a square of foam through the marmot’s mouth for cell samples, Philson’s colleague, UCLA master’s student Mackenzie Scurka, used calipers to measure one tiny paw. Then Philson thanked his subject for not dousing us in feces. “It’s much nicer when they poop in the trap and not on us,” he said.