Scientists in Colorado are broke, so they started an OnlyFans account for marmots.
That’s not a joke, and it’s not a metaphor. A research program at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory has been tracking yellow-bellied marmots since 1962, one of the longest-running wildlife studies in the country. Then federal grants got pulled last year and the whole thing was staring down the end. So the team, led by UCLA professor Daniel Blumstein, did what anyone raised on the internet would do: they made a page and asked people to tip.
The account is called OnlyMarms. Subscribing is free. The lab makes money from tips instead, and a first-year grad student named Emily Renkey runs it, posting videos of marmots waddling around rocks and eating flowers. Blumstein told the New York Times it’s going to stay G-rated, which feels like a sentence nobody should have had to say out loud in an official capacity. So far the page has pulled in a little over six thousand dollars toward a study that’s been running for sixty-four years, and OnlyFans takes its usual cut off the top before any of it reaches the marmots’ rent.
I want to be clear that I don’t think this is embarrassing for the scientists. It’s the opposite. They looked at a funding cliff and figured out a way to keep the lights on without begging a committee that already said no. That’s resourcefulness, and I respect it. What bugs me is the position they were put in to begin with. A study that’s been running since before the moon landing, one that’s actually taught us real things about animal behavior and climate patterns, is now dependent on strangers clicking a tip jar next to a platform mostly known for something else entirely.
This is where we’ve landed with a lot of institutions now. Teachers buy their own classroom supplies through DonorsChoose because the district budget doesn’t stretch, and local newsrooms lean on a few hundred Patreon subscribers instead of ad revenue that dried up years ago. None of that is new exactly, but watching the same pattern show up in wildlife biology is a pretty stark reminder of how far it’s spread. When the institutions meant to fund long-term public good start treating it as optional, individuals end up covering the gap with whatever platform will take a payment. And they always find one.
So sure, laugh at the headline. It’s funny. A marmot influencer account is objectively funny, and I clicked around it myself for way longer than I want to admit. But somewhere underneath the joke is a research team that had to turn wild animals into content creators just to keep a light on in a research station. That’s not really a story about marmots. It’s a story about what happens when you stop paying for the boring, unglamorous stuff that takes decades to pay off.
My two cents: root for the marmots, but don’t let the cute animal video distract you from asking why it had to come to this in the first place.