In April, the scientists of the Marmot Project usually ski in to their field station at Gothic, Colorado. This year they walked the whole way on bare ground. Dan Blumstein, who has led the study since 2001, spent a week in the field in May and wrote afterwards that the season was unlike anything he had ever seen. Snowpacks had been getting thinner for years, but there had always been skis. His student Emily Renkey took photographs comparing the road four years earlier with the road now. The marmots were already telling the team something: they were coming out of their burrows early, exposed to coyotes and foxes, and some of them, Blumstein suspected, were simply gone.
They were. The lab had closed the previous autumn with around 160 animals in the population, and only about 60 came up out of the ground in spring. Snow works as an insulating blanket over a hibernating marmot’s burrow. Without it, the temperature underground swings, and a sleeping animal burns fat it cannot spare. Many of them ran out of fat before they could emerge and start eating again. Roughly 100 marmots in the study died over the winter. The record low snowpack also meant that the wildflowers, a key food source, did not bloom in their usual numbers. “It’s super sad,” Renkey told The Denver Post. “There was no snow on the ground, which insulates the marmots over the winter from temperature fluctuations in the air. So they were using more of their body fat to try and stay warm”.
A year like this is exactly what a sixty-five-year dataset exists to record. Kenneth Armitage began studying the yellow-bellied marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in 1962 and led the work until 2001, when Blumstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA, took over the daily running of it. He now shares management with Julien Martin of the University of Ottawa. Yellow-bellied marmots are neither threatened nor endangered, and that is part of the point: the species makes a good subject for decades-deep study of population biology and behaviour, and the lab describes the database built up since 1962 as priceless. It is one of the longest-running studies of its kind anywhere, and has been described as the second-longest study of individually identified mammals in the world, after Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees in Tanzania.
None of that was enough. In 2025, RMBL lost federal funding for the Marmot Project as the Trump administration moved money towards artificial intelligence, robotics and nuclear energy, and away from what the president’s science adviser called life sciences. Back in 2001, money from the National Science Foundation had been comparatively easy to get. When Blumstein applied to renew the funding for another ten years, he was turned down three times and finally told to stop applying, on the grounds that the project already had too much data. He found this bewildering for a study whose whole purpose is to watch evolution unfold across generations and to produce science that policymakers and land managers can use.
The solution came to him on 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. “When I came back with this idea, one of my graduate students immediately said we MUST do this! So here we are!” The night before, he had watched Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a show about a woman who starts an OnlyFans account and makes a great deal of money. As Renkey tells it, his reasoning was simple: marmots have money troubles too, so why not an OnlyFans account for the marmots. On June 17 the project announced on Instagram that funding was so bad they were turning to OnlyFans, or, as they liked to call it, OnlyMarms.
The content, Blumstein is careful to point out, is G-rated, occasionally edging into PG if two marmots scuffle. Subscriptions are free and the lab asks for tips. The posts show marmots playing, digging and carrying plants back to their burrows: ordinary marmot business. Asked how much the account had raised, Blumstein was blunt. “Not much,” he said. “We’re letting folks have free subscriptions and ask for tips. They [OnlyFans] take 20% and I have to pay taxes on the balance”. By early August it had brought in about $4,000 after the platform’s cut. The first few hundred dollars went on bait, which lures marmots close enough to study. Blumstein told NPR the project needs $75,000 to $100,000 to keep its graduate students going, which is what the federal government used to provide.
Then things became stranger still. A meme coin community built a cryptocurrency around OnlyMarms and told the lab it could claim the coin and collect fees on trades. Renkey did not believe it was real the first few times people contacted her. The lab claimed it anyway, which seems to have given the coin legitimacy and attracted more buyers, and a “meme coin for good” movement formed around it. The transaction fees have 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.
The lab had been talking about a Fat Marmot Week for years, modelled on Katmai’s Fat Bear Week, and this August they finally ran it with eight adult marmots. One of them, a male called Dawn, spent much of the summer refusing to enter a trap. Marmots know what they are doing around traps and sometimes step carefully over the trigger plate. Eventually Dawn got carried away with the bait. In June he weighed about 8.6 pounds; on August 15 he weighed about 13, which Renkey points out is the weight of a very large cat. He beat a male called G, and because he had also gained more than half his body weight, he won both the people’s choice and the girthiest titles.
All that fat has one job: to burn slowly for eight months while the animal’s body temperature drops to just above freezing. “You pick up a hibernating marmot and it’s this fuzzy ball and it feels like a cold rock with fur. It’s completely surreal,” Blumstein said. “They breathe once a minute or two”.
That is what the money is for. What the project learns travels: the Vancouver Island Marmot Recovery Project, working with a few dozen animals that almost disappeared completely, uses the Colorado research to shape its recovery plan.
“The marmots don’t know how famous they are,” Renkey said, laughing.