The Marmot Project in Crested Butte, Colorado, is one of the oldest continuous mammal studies on Earth. Since 1962, researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory have tracked individual yellow-bellied marmots, recording who mates with whom, who survives which winter, and how the colony responds to a changing climate. Only Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee research has run longer. This summer, the project’s funding ran out, so its director, UCLA ecologist Daniel Blumstein, did what cash-strapped researchers increasingly do: he opened an OnlyFans account. The page, @OnlyMarms, offers unfiltered, G-rated yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies, and its small team is hoping tips from the public keep a 64-year-old dataset alive.
The financial trouble is real and recent. Federal grants the team relied on were canceled in 2025, part of a broader contraction that left National Science Foundation funding at its lowest level since the mid-1980s, according to the grant-tracking project Grant Witness. The grants paid for the graduate students who hold the study together, Blumstein has said. One program officer reportedly told him the project’s decades of accumulated data actually hurt its grant applications: the research was already done, the reasoning went, so why fund more? The team’s counterargument is that long-term monitoring exists precisely to detect change, and this year handed them a brutal example: the second-largest die-off in the project’s history. Of 160 marmots observed last year, only about 60 survived the winter, after a thin snowpack left burrows exposed to cold.
The pivot to OnlyFans came with a dose of irony. Blumstein has said the idea struck him after watching a television series about a cash-strapped family that starts an OnlyFans business, and he returned to the lab announcing that the marmot project had the same problem. Graduate student Emily Renkey, who has worked with the project since 2022 and now maintains the page, posts daily videos of marmots digging, eating, and sunning themselves. Subscriptions are free, with tips accepted. The account raised roughly $4,000 in its first weeks and more than $5,000 by early August, according to reporting by the BBC. That is far short of a graduate student’s salary, but it signals genuine public interest, and the coverage itself has compound value: the story has been picked up by the New York Times, NPR, the Los Angeles Times, and other outlets.
OnlyMarms is one arm of a wider fundraising push by the group, which calls itself the Marmoteers. There is Marmot Tears IPA, brewed with Irwin Brewing Company of Crested Butte; a memecoin; and Fat Marmot Week, an August event modeled on Katmai National Park’s Fat Bear Week, in which the public votes for the chunkiest marmot of the season. Blumstein has stressed that the project continues to pursue conventional grants alongside the stunts. An OnlyFans spokesperson told the trade press Inc. that the company was pleased to see people finding creative new uses for the platform.
The setting adds to the story’s weight. The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory occupies the ghost town of Gothic, high in Colorado’s Elk Mountains, where summer research has run since 1928. The marmot dataset is individual-based: decades of life histories for known animals, spanning generations, feeding studies of social behavior, hibernation, and climate response. Yellow-bellied marmots are not endangered, and the study’s urgency is not about saving a species. It is about understanding how a hibernating mammal copes with a warming world, and the immediate cause of this year’s die-off, a snowpack too thin to insulate burrows from winter cold, is exactly the kind of climate signal the long record exists to document.
There is a serious undercurrent beneath the levity. Long-term ecological studies cannot be paused and resumed: a gap in the marmot record is a permanent hole in the dataset, exactly at the moment climate change is rewriting marmot winters. The die-off this year, with 100 of 160 animals failing to survive, is the kind of event the dataset exists to catch. If keeping the record alive means selling marmot videos on a platform better known for adult content, that says something about the state of science funding, and about the creativity scientists will deploy to protect irreplaceable data.
The experiment is still small: five figures of crowdfunding against a funding system that moves millions. But the project’s history suggests the bet may pay off differently than the accountants expect. Ken Armitage founded the study in 1962 with no guarantee it would outlast him; more than sixty years later, its survival depends on whether the public cares enough to tip for a video of a marmot eating grass. Early returns suggest plenty of people do.
Sources: The Guardian, August 7, 2026; UPI, July 28, 2026; The Denver Gazette, August 4, 2026; BBC News, August 6, 2026; NPR, August 2, 2026; UCLA Newsroom, July 27, 2026; The New York Times, July 25, 2026.