One of the world’s longest-running studies of wild mammals was running out of money, so the scientists did the obvious thing and put the marmots on OnlyFans. A few months, thousands of dollars and one completely unexpected meme coin later, the research has enough money to keep going.
Professor Dan Blumstein was sitting in an empty meadow in Colorado waiting for marmots to do something when he had an idea.
The ecological study he helps lead had been tracking yellow-bellied marmots in the Rocky Mountains since 1962, making it one of the longest continuous studies of individually identified mammals anywhere in the world. Its funding had become uncertain after repeated grant applications were rejected, and a dataset built across generations of scientists suddenly faced a fairly ordinary problem: someone still had to pay for people to go into the field and keep collecting it.
Blumstein had recently watched Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a television series about a woman who turns to OnlyFans when she needs money. Sitting in the meadow, he made the obvious intellectual leap.
The marmots had money troubles too.
When he took the idea back to his students, one of them immediately supplied the name: OnlyMarms.
And so, one of the more serious long-running ecological studies in America ended up on a platform best known for something very different.
The page is completely safe for work. It features yellow-bellied marmots running around rocks, emerging from burrows, sounding alarm calls and generally doing the sort of things marmots have been doing long before anybody invented subscription content. The researchers made the account free and allowed followers to leave tips, turning years of camera-trap footage into a very unusual science fundraiser.
There was an early administrative problem because OnlyFans requires people appearing on an account to verify their age and identity. Blumstein had to explain that the stars of this particular page were marmots and would struggle to provide driver’s licences. The account was eventually approved.
That detail alone would have been enough for a good internet story, except the internet then made the whole thing considerably stranger.
OnlyMarms began bringing in thousands of dollars in tips, but supporters outside the project then created a marmot-themed cryptocurrency called $OnlyMarms and arranged for transaction fees to be donated back to the research. Within weeks, the meme coin had generated tens of thousands of dollars, and combined with OnlyFans tips and other donations, the project had raised more than US$100,000, enough for the team to continue its fieldwork for another year.
This is objectively ridiculous. It is also kind of wonderful.
The scientists have spent decades recording the lives of animals with names like Egg and Jamba Juice, taking body measurements and blood samples and observing how marmots interact, respond to predators, reproduce, survive and adapt as their mountain environment changes. The value of the project comes from something science cannot manufacture quickly: time.
You can study an animal for a summer and learn a lot. Study generations of the same population for more than 60 years and you can begin to see what happens when winters change, temperatures rise, social structures shift and one difficult year becomes part of a much longer pattern.
UCLA researchers have already used more than six decades of marmot data to study questions ranging from longevity to the effects of hardship early in life, while the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory has described its long-running datasets as vital for understanding how alpine ecosystems respond to environmental change.
That makes the funding problem particularly odd. The longer a study runs, the more scientifically unusual it becomes, but it also has to keep convincing someone to pay for another year. There is no exciting launch date for year 65 of watching marmots. The achievement is that somebody was there for year 64 and will still be there for year 66.
OnlyMarms works because the researchers seem to understand the absurdity rather than pretending it is normal. They call themselves Marmoteers, have started planning a Fat Marmot Week inspired by Alaska’s Fat Bear Week and are using the animals’ pre-hibernation weight gain as another excuse to get ordinary people interested in field ecology.
There is a slightly uncomfortable story underneath the fun, because one of the world’s longest animal studies probably should not depend on whether a rodent becomes good at internet content. Blumstein and his team have been clear that social media tips and meme coins are not a sensible replacement for stable scientific funding.
But there is another side to it that feels genuinely encouraging. People found out the study was in trouble, cared about something they previously knew nothing about and found an extremely 2026 way to help.
The researchers needed money. The internet had memes, crypto and an adult-content subscription platform. Somehow those things met in the middle and bought another year of science.
It is difficult to imagine Ken Armitage, who began studying the marmots in 1962, predicting that one day the future of his dataset might depend partly on OnlyFans. He probably would have been even more confused by the sentence “marmot meme coin transaction fees”.
The marmots themselves remain completely unaware of their new careers. They are still in Colorado, getting extremely fat before winter while a group of scientists watches them, records everything and, thankfully, now has enough money to come back next year.
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