In April, the researchers of the Marmot Project usually ski in to their field station at Gothic, Colorado. This year they walked in on bare ground, the whole way. Dan Blumstein, who has led the study since 2001, left Gothic in May after a week in the field and wrote that the season was unlike anything he had ever seen. Snowpacks had been thinning for years, but there had always been skis. His student Emily Renkey took photographs comparing the road as it looked four years earlier with the road as it looked now. The marmots were already telling them something: they were emerging early, exposed to coyotes and foxes, and some of them, he suspected, were simply gone.
They were. The lab had closed the previous autumn with roughly 160 animals in the population. 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. A great many ran out before they could emerge and start eating again. Roughly 100 marmots in the study died over the winter. The record low snowpack also kept the wildflowers, a key food source, from blooming 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”.
This is exactly the kind of year that a sixty-five-year dataset exists to catch. Kenneth Armitage began studying the yellow-bellied marmots at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in 1962 and led the work through 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, which is part of the point: the species makes a good subject for detailed, decades-deep study of population biology and behaviour, and the database built up since 1962 is, as the lab puts it, priceless. It is one of the longest-running mark-recapture studies of a non-game animal 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 which was enough. In 2025, RMBL lost federal funding for the Marmot Project as the Trump administration shifted money towards artificial intelligence, robotics and nuclear energy, and away from what the president’s science adviser called life sciences. Back in 2001, National Science Foundation money had been comparatively easy to get. When Blumstein went to renew for another ten years, he was turned down three times and eventually 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 evolutionary processes unfold across generations and to produce usable science for policymakers and land managers.
The solution arrived 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 ran: 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 has been careful to note, 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, being cute, hauling plants back to their burrows: ordinary marmot business. Asked how much OnlyMarms had actually 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 the account had brought in about $4,000 after the platform’s cut. Renkey, a first-year master’s student, chooses what to post, aiming for material that will teach something and also produce an audible aw. The first few hundred dollars went on bait, the stuff that lures marmots close enough to study. Blumstein told NPR the project needs $75,000 to $100,000 to keep graduate students going, which is what the federal government used to provide. It is frustrating, he said, because those hours belong to papers and students. But we’re doing this, he said, which is kind of silly in the long run.
Then the absurdity compounded. 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 lent the thing legitimacy and pulled in 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 considering a Fat Marmot Week for years, modelled on Katmai’s Fat Bear Week. This August they finally ran it, with eight adult marmots, each with a story. One of them, a male called Dawn, spent much of the summer refusing to enter a trap. The team likes to say the marmots are willing participants in their own research, and Dawn, for a while, was not willing. Marmots know what they are doing around traps, sometimes stepping 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 notes is a very large cat. He beat a male called G, and because he had also gained the most mass, more than half his body weight, he took both the people’s choice and the girthiest titles. Blumstein’s standard of beauty is simple: the epitome of a marmot is one that looks like a bread loaf by the end of the season, he says, and body positivity is all about marmots. Meanwhile the nearby Irwin Brewing Company brewed a Marmot Tears IPA and is giving the proceeds to RMBL.
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. Marmots are a model system: mammals, hibernators, flexibly social, long-lived for rodents but not so long-lived that you cannot watch generations turn over. What the project learns travels. The Vancouver Island Marmot Recovery Project, working with a few dozen animals that nearly vanished entirely, draws on the Colorado work to shape its recovery plan.
“The marmots don’t know how famous they are,” Renkey said, laughing.