If you’re hiking in the Utah mountains and hear a high-pitched call, start looking for a fuzzy, gray potato. You might be lucky enough to spot a pika. The native animal resembles a rodent but is more closely related to rabbits.
“They're about as close as you can get to a spherical mammal,” said Johanna Varner, an associate professor of biology with Colorado Mesa University who studies pikas.
But as global temperatures rise, these adorable alpine residents face new threats.
“A sphere is the perfect body shape for conserving heat,” Varner said. “So, they’re really good at conserving heat when it's cold, but they struggle a little bit to dump heat when it gets too hot.”
Varner is one of the researchers who published a new study focused on how pikas in southeast Utah’s La Sal Mountains are coping with increasingly extreme swings in weather fueled by climate change.
Her team surveyed the high-elevation habitat annually from 2018 to 2023 — trapping pikas, giving them colored ear tags, placing temperature sensors on the landscape and collecting poop to test for stress hormones. The six-year study period provided data about a wide range of weather conditions, and the team found the highest stress levels coincided with the warmest, driest winters.
That sparks concerns about how Utah’s record-warm winter with record-low snowpack may affect La Sal pikas.
“What that suggests is that, going into the summer this year, the pikas may already have elevated stress,” Varner said, “which may make it a little bit more difficult to carry out the things that they need to do during the summer and live to see the next year.”
Pikas usually burrow under snow in the winter, so less white stuff means less insulation from frigid temps. And poor snowmelt means less runoff watering the plants they eat.
“There have been population declines that have been linked to climate change in parts of the pika’s range,” said student researcher Karli Weatherill, who co-authored the study with Varner.
That’s especially troubling because high-elevation species like the pika are often early indicators of the impacts climate change may have — the canaries in the coal mine of a warming world.
“So, that means you can tell a lot about how the rest of the environment is doing based off of how well the pikas are doing,” Weatherill said.
Besides being cute, pikas play an important role in alpine ecosystems. They provide food for a variety of predators, and the way they carry vegetation into rock piles creates new soil and helps plants travel up slopes.
Across Utah, pikas’ habitat ranges from lava fields near Cedar City to boulder piles in the Wasatch and Uintah Mountains. The state is home to four of the five pika subspecies found in the U.S.
“Utah's just sort of a convergence zone of all these different pikas,” said Kim Hersey, a mammal conservation coordinator with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. “They're just an amazing wild, watchable wildlife opportunity that help people understand and appreciate some of the cool critters that we have and the need to wisely steward those landscapes.”
Utah began a state pika monitoring program in 2008, checking survey sites every three years through 2017 and then revisiting them in 2023.
Over those 15 years, Hersey said pika occupancy remained fairly high and stable across the state. Pikas that lived in smaller, isolated groups were found to be more vulnerable than those whose homes connected with other suitable habitat options nearby, though.
That’s one reason why the La Sal pikas may be at risk.
“If you think about mountains as islands in the sky, the La Sals are basically the equivalent of Fiji,” Varner said. “They're surrounded by red rock desert for 40 miles in all directions.”
That means pikas would not be able to migrate on or off the La Sals from other habitats. Scientific evidence indicates the pikas that live there have been secluded for a long time, she said, and they’ve even developed a unique call.
Regionwide research has shown smaller, isolated habitats have seen population declines strongly linked to climate change in recent years, Varner said.
“Warming temperatures in the mountains is a little bit like a rising sea level,” she said. Pikas may be able to move up the slope to follow their preferred temperatures, but only to a point. The available habitat gets smaller and smaller as the mountain nears its peak, and there may not be any plants to eat at the very top because it’s all rock.
Her team’s study points to some potential solutions that might be able to give the La Sal critters a boost, though.
Pikas that lived near areas with more grassy plants to eat had lower levels of stress hormones, Weatherill said. That suggests allowing more grass to grow in pika habitat could ease the pressure.
“One of the management solutions that could be feasible,” she said, “is manage the grazing patterns of cattle or restrict cattle grazing during the most active periods of when pikas are amassing their hay piles for the winter.”
Her team doesn’t have direct evidence that cattle are competing with pikas for grass, but the data suggests any activity that decreases the amount of grass could further stress pikas. That’s actually good news, Varner said because — unlike reducing the global emissions that fuel climate change — grazing is something that’s under local land managers’ control.
Other research has begun studying the effects of mountain goat grazing on pika habitat, too. Goats aren’t native to the La Sals, but the state introduced them there starting in 2013. Some environmental groups have argued that adding mountain goats threatens the fragile alpine ecosystem.
Utahns can help scientists better understand how pikas are faring across the state by cataloging sightings on an app called Pika Patrol, Varner said.
If you do see pikas on a hike, Hersey said be sure to give them some distance and don’t feed them. But feel free to enjoy the view.
“They are so incredibly cute and charismatic,” she said. “Get out there and see them. Enjoy them.”
