In April, the scientists of the Marmot Project usually ski into their field station at Gothic, Colorado. This year there was no snow, so they walked in on bare ground the whole way. Dan Blumstein, who has led the study since 2001, spent a week in the field in May and wrote that the season was unlike anything he had ever seen. His student Emily Renkey took photographs of the road and compared them with photographs from four years earlier. The marmots came out of the ground early, which left them exposed to coyotes and foxes, and Blumstein suspected that some of them were simply gone.
He was right. In autumn there had been about 160 animals in the population. In spring only about 60 came up out of the ground. Snow works like a warm blanket over a sleeping marmot’s burrow. Without snow, the temperature underground goes up and down, and a hibernating animal burns fat that it cannot afford to lose. Many marmots ran out of fat before they could come out and eat again. About 100 marmots in the study died during the winter, and the wildflowers they eat did not bloom in their usual numbers. “It’s super sad,” Renkey told The Denver Post.
A year like this is exactly why the study exists. Kenneth Armitage began studying the yellow-bellied marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in 1962. Blumstein, a professor at UCLA, took over the daily work in 2001, and he now shares the management with Julien Martin of the University of Ottawa. The species is not endangered, and that is part of the point: it is a good subject for a long, detailed study of animal populations and behaviour. It is described as the second-longest study of individually known mammals in the world, after Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees in Tanzania.
Even so, in 2025 the laboratory lost its federal funding, because the government moved money towards artificial intelligence, robotics and nuclear energy. When Blumstein tried to renew the grant, he was refused three times and finally told to stop applying, because the project already had too much data. He found this hard to understand, since the whole purpose of the study is to watch changes across many generations.
The idea for a solution came during a slow morning in the field. “I spend a lot of time waiting for marmots to do things and had the idea one slow morning,” Blumstein said. The night before, he had watched a show about a woman with money troubles who starts an OnlyFans account and earns a lot. Marmots have money troubles too, he thought, so why not an account for the marmots. In June the project announced the plan on Instagram and called it OnlyMarms.
The posts show marmots playing, digging and carrying plants back to their burrows. Subscriptions are free and the lab asks for tips. By early August the account had raised about $4,000. Renkey chooses what to post, and the first few hundred dollars paid for bait to attract marmots. Blumstein told NPR that the project needs $75,000 to $100,000 a year to support graduate students.
Then something stranger happened. A group of people created a cryptocurrency around OnlyMarms and told the lab it could collect fees on trades. Renkey did not believe it was real at first. The lab accepted, more buyers arrived, and the fees have now brought the project more than $140,000. “What I will say is, it is not the community we expected to rally behind us, but we are very grateful for them,” Renkey said.
In August the lab finally ran its Fat Marmot Week, with eight adult marmots. A male called Dawn spent much of the summer avoiding the traps, stepping carefully around them, until he could not resist the bait. In June he weighed about 8.6 pounds. On August 15 he weighed about 13, which Renkey says is the weight of a very large cat. He won both titles.
“The marmots don’t know how famous they are,” Renkey said, laughing.