For over 60 years, a team of researchers at UCLA has been studying the same colony of yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains near Crested Butte. It’s one of the longest-running wildlife studies in American history, tracking everything from social behavior to how climate change affects wild animal populations. Generations of scientists have built careers around these fat, cheerful little rodents.
Then the funding dried up.
Federal research grants have been slashed dramatically across the country, and Blumstein’s marmot team was among thousands of research projects left scrambling. They’d already had a brutal year. When the team arrived at their field station this spring, they found that record-low snowpack had left the hibernating marmots without insulation. Over 100 animals died over the winter, the second largest die-off in the study’s 60-year history.
With their funding gone and their marmots dying, the team made a decision. They started an OnlyFans.
They call it OnlyMarms.
Before you get any ideas: the content is entirely G-rated. “Almost all G-rated content of marmots playing, being cute, digging, bringing plants to their burrows,” said professor Daniel Blumstein. “The occasional scuffle makes it PG-rated.”
The team announced it on Instagram with the caption: “The state of funding is so bad we are turning to OnlyFans, or as we like to call it, OnlyMarms.”
Researcher Emily Renkey was more direct. “We should not have to make an OnlyFans account for our marmots in order to get funding,” she said. “But I think that’s where we’re at.”
Blumstein was clear-eyed about the limits of the experiment. “If we’re lucky, it can help raise money for supplies and some expenses,” he said. “But unless we are very lucky, it won’t replace the federal funding that has driven discovery in the US since the 1950s.
After Funding Cuts, Scientists Started an OnlyFans for Marmots Called OnlyMarms
