A population of Colorado marmots are gaining notoriety as the subject of a new OnlyFans page and weight-gain competition to raise awareness and funds for long-term study of the species. 

Scientists from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic have launched a bracket-style competition to determine which yellow-bellied marmot from the local population is the chunkiest of them all. The inaugural Fat Marmot Week was announced by the lab in late July as a way to raise awareness about the mammals and long-term research conducted at the site.

“It’s fun to root for the chunkiest marmot, but behind the fun and games is a deathly serious competition against nature to pile on fat to survive the long, cold winter,” said Dan Blumstein, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Los Angeles and co-director of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory Marmot Project, in a news release. “And these days, with less predictable weather and wild fluctuations in snowfall, survival is not guaranteed.”  

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Yellow-bellied marmots are the only native marmot species to Colorado. The size of a house cat, the ground squirrels are notorious for their high-pitched whistle and charismatic personalities. They typically reside in colonies in high-elevation rocky areas, talus fields and mountain meadows. 

How the Fat Marmot Week winner will be crowned 

The bracket will open for voting on Aug. 24, and eight marmots will face off round-by-round until the winner is crowned Aug. 29. Voters will be asked to weigh in on which marmot is most ready to enter hibernation, something the mammals have been preparing months for. 

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Marmots are “true hibernators,” meaning they “actually enter a state of torpor where their body temperature drops to just above freezing and their heart rate slows way down and their breathing slows,” said Emily Renkey, a first year master’s student at UCLA in her first full field season at the lab in Gothic.  

“They spend most of the winter in that state,” Renkey said. “That allows them to spend all winter, you know, burning very little fat, so they can emerge again in the spring, still alive.” 

So, put simply, “the fatter they get, the more likely they are to survive the winter,” said Katie Adler, a third-year PhD candidate at UCLA in her third field season with the marmots. 

This is compared to other hibernators, including bears, which enter a state of rest but are still alert, able to feed their cubs and more. Adler added that “because (marmots’) bodies essentially shut down for eight months, they are not aging,” and it makes them one of the longer-lived rodent species. Although, only 50% of marmot pups survive their first year.  

To prepare to enter this state — and for the inaugural Fat Marmot Week — marmots’ diets consist almost exclusively of flowers. For the Gothic marmots, this is good news as “Crested Butte is the wildflower capital of Colorado,” meaning the marmots are not limited on resources, Adler said. 

“So they basically just eat constantly,” she added. 

Marmots eat so many flowers and grasses that they actually don’t drink water, Adler said.

“They get all of their water from plants,” she said.  

Renkey said that in capturing one of the female competitors — who had a significant jiggle — for Fat Marmot Week on Wednesday, “it’s hard not to appreciate all of the work she’s put in throughout the summer to get to the point she’s at now.” 

“She’s working really hard; you got to respect the hustle,” Renkey said. 

The new Colorado competition is a callback to the popular Fat Bear Week in Alaska. This bracket-style competition features grizzly bears from the Katmai National Park and Preserve and started initially in 2014 as a way to show the similar weight-gaining transformation the animals go through from early to late summer. The National Park Service says it garners participation from 1 billion people in over 100 countries.  

“Fat Bear Week had something right in that it’s much more fun to engage with science when you are actively participating in it in some way,” Renkey said. “Fat Marmot Week is supposed to not only teach people something, but also make them feel like they’re a participant in the work in some way.”

It was something researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab had long talked about, but it took Blumstein going on a podcast — Ologies with Allie Ward — where the idea was brought up and led a willing volunteer to step up and help coordinate the competition. 

“But also, this year has kind of turned into a perfect year to do this,” Renkey said. “Since there was no snow over the winter, the marmots not only emerged earlier from hibernation, but they also started eating a lot earlier than they’re normally able to — and so everyone is huge. It’s absolutely insane.”

Raising funds for science on ‘OnlyMarms’

It’s been a busy year for the Gothic marmots — not only as they bulk up for winter but as the subject of their own “OnlyMarms” page on adult content subscription site, OnlyFans. In a June Instagram post, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory Project said “the state of funding is so bad we are turning to OnlyFans, or as we like to call it ‘OnlyMarms,'” promising subscribers “uncensored marmot content.”

In an NPR podcast, Blumstein said federal funding cuts to U.S. science prompted the creative fundraising solution.

“We have some funding for next year, but after that, it’s looking very dire,” Blumstein said on the podcast. “And part of that is because the universities are being cut. Our department lost a third of our support for graduate students, so we’re accepting fewer graduate students. And it’s the graduate students who are out here for the five-month field season that it takes to keep this thing going.”

By the end of July, the page had raised over $4,000, significantly shy of the $75,000 to $100,000 needed to support the lab’s graduate students, Blumstein said. 

While it’s a unique approach to fundraising and raising awareness around science, it also suits marmots, which have complex social lives, personalities and “a lot of character,” Renkey said.

As the eight contenders are introduced on Instagram and the website leading up to Fat Marmot Week, voters will also get to learn about the individuals, which are named for the unique fur marks given to them by researchers.

Take Dan’s Hat, for example, a marmot described on the website as a “cool aunt” who “didn’t breed this year and was hoping to be an aunt until a badger ate all of her nieces and nephews.” Open Kite has also been introduced as the “girl boss” of the group, and, in not mating this year, has been “able to allocate all of her energy to self-maintanence,” a.k.a weight gain.

Adler said that the hope is that Fat Marmot Week will bring more awareness and respect to the study’s work, the marmots themselves and the broader ecosystem. 

“The more you learn about a species, the more you respect them,” Renkey said. “Marmots are a really good opportunity to connect with the natural world, connect with wildlife.” 

Why the marmot study matter 

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory has been studying Gothic’s yellow-bellied marmots since 1962, earning a title as the second-longest running study of individually marked mammals. The research has led to numerous studies on the species’ genetics, behavior, communication and social lives.

According to its website, while studies like this are rare, they “help scientists understand how animal populations respond to changing conditions,” especially as “climate continues to change.” 

In the Fat Marmot Week news release, Blumstein said that marmots specifically help “give us a window on the health of high-alpine ecosystems.” 

The research can be extrapolated to other species and helps inform how wildlife responds to environmental change, avoids predators, communicates and interacts with one another. 

“A lot of times our work is such that we haven’t asked the questions that we’re asking in our study system about any other wild mammals,” Renkey said.  

The marmot project is only one of 14 ongoing scientific research projects that are over 30 years old at the site. Each summer, it hosts over 200 researchers and students from over 140 colleges and universities, in addition to hundreds of K-12 students and thousands of visitors.  

“I think that this is one of the best studied valleys in the world,” Renkey said. “There’s just like all of these resources at our disposal, which I think helps us learn a lot about this valley, but also just about the world around us.”