Somewhere around 2,900 metres high in the Elk Mountains of Colorado, a yellow-bellied marmot called Jamba Juice is stuffing her face. She will do little else until the snow comes. Marmots are the largest of the ‘true’ hibernators’, animals who sleep so deeply they are almost impossible to wake. This means that the summer is one long, dedicated calorific frenzy: put on enough fat by September or risk not waking up in May.
Researchers have been watching marmots like Jamba Juice since 1962. The marmot study, run out of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), is the second-longest continuous study of individually marked mammals anywhere in the world, second only to Jane Goodall’s famous chimp study. Every animal is identified, named and followed across its lifetime. The resulting dataset reveals unique information about generations of marmots, their habits and their changing environment in the Rockies. Its continuous length means its results can’t be rushed or reconstructed.
In 2025, the project very nearly came to a sudden end.
Funding cuts almost cost the project
Under Trump’s latest administration, the US National Science Foundation declined to renew the project’s funding. The decision was part of a broader contraction in US federal research spending. In 2025, thousands of grants were cancelled and far fewer awarded than in previous years, for studies into animals, climate change and even cancer research. Despite their small size and relatively large families, tracking marmots is not cheap; salaries, field logistics, lab costs and outreach for a single season run to around $140,000. Miss a year and the continuity that makes the data valuable is simply gone.
The continuity of the project has so far bought a record 11 generations of observed marmots and, as Professor Julien Martin points out, evidence of a broader changing environment. Although marmots aren’t themselves endangered, observing changes across the 11 generations as to when they emerge from hibernation, how much fat they carry and whether they survive the winter, highlight measurable effects of climate change over time.
In scientific terms, this is where the structural vulnerability of longitudinal ecology lies. Or, to put it another way, the value of such studies lies in their duration. However, grant cycles run in three- and five-year blocks—frustratingly similar in length to US presidency terms—and funders are asked to justify spending against outcomes that may not arrive for decades.
The solution: fur, followers and fees
The team’s response was initially less of a strategy than a joke that got out of hand. In fact, had Daniel Blumstein, a professor at UCLA and eventual co-lead of the project, not recently watched Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a TV show about a woman who joins OnlyFans to support her child, it’s possible OnlyMarms would have never come into existence. OnlyFans is a subscription service for content creators valued at $1.55 billion, but is traditionally associated with sexually explicit content.
Initially, the researchers decided to put the marmots on the platform simply to raise funds. Blumstein was clear that the intent of the stunt was celebration rather than titillation; as he put it, the goal “isn’t to sexualise marmots”. The content, instead, displays near-daily dispatches from the colony: marmots scrambling over talus. Marmots vanishing into burrows. Marmots being, in the account’s own self-assessment, “adorable for all ages”. Subscriptions are free; viewers tip for the footage.
The project’s playfulness goes beyond the concept, aiming to nurture a community of marmot enthusiasts. An interactive gallery allows visitors to paint their own marmots. Fat Marmot Week in late August is now marked with a browser game in which players race an increasingly rotund marmot towards the first snowfall. Their ploy of promoting ecological awareness by way of meme culture quickly picked up speed and allowed their content to be widely shared online.
The gambit worked brilliantly as publicity, if modestly as a fundraising tool. Tips reached around $6,000. Soon, the story escaped the science pages and hit a broad audience of internet users as well as global news publications.
Scam or saviour?
What followed is an even stranger twist. An online community—one nobody at the lab had ever heard of—minted a Solana-based memecoin called OnlyMarms and pointed the trading royalties at the research. Martin’s reasonable first assumption was that he was looking at a scam. However, it wasn’t, and by mid-September 2026, the token had generated roughly $142,649 for the project: a full field season, staff, lab, outreach and all.
What is a memecoin?
“Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency that are often inspired by internet memes, characters, or trends. They are typically supported by enthusiastic online communities and are generally intended to be light-hearted and fun.
As with other cryptocurrencies, memecoins rely on blockchain technology, a type of distributed database used to track virtual assets. Most memecoins are purely trading instruments, unlike Ethereum and other utility currencies tied to specific blockchain features.”
– Coinbase, 2026
(Image: Crystal Mapes / unsplash)
Martin has noted the obvious irony. Cryptocurrency is a sector from which Trump has personally netted an estimated $635m through his own memecoin. Scientists whose grants were cut are now propped up by the same machinery that has enriched the man who cut them.
Cryptocurrency is also energy-intensive. Blockchain mining is responsible for 0.6 percent of global electricity consumption—that’s more than the whole country of Ukraine. If OnlyMarms exists even partly to track how climate change is affecting marmots, being bankrolled by crypto means being funded by an industry that helps heat the mountains those marmots live on.
READ MORE: The Blockchain Paradox: Can Its Potential for Digital Solutions Outweigh Its Carbon Footprint?
A rescue is not a system
However, crowdfunding does not scale to infrastructure. The team say so themselves. Attention is a depleting resource; there is no second year, let alone another 64, where marmots joining OnlyFans is news. A funding model that depends on being surprising has an implicit expiry date. Sadly, this means that permanent monitoring is unlikely unless something changes.
OnlyMarms is not the only project trying to fill their coffers using public funding. Platforms like Experiment.com let scientists raise money directly from the public, however, the sums involved are typically a fraction of what a federal grant provides. Crowdfunding as a tool for raising capital can suit short, self-contained projects. However, themes like climate research depend on long-term datasets, where a single missed season can leave a permanent hole in the record. As public funding ebbs and flows, it’s simply not a viable long-term solution.
Perhaps, the central story here isn’t that marmot researchers were inventive, but that 11 painstaking generations of climate evidence were left dependent on internet goodwill. Should the security of a research project rely on the charisma of its subjects?
Are the sharable creatures the only ones worth saving?
Marmots are, let’s face it, photogenic. Soil invertebrates, or groundwater chemistry? Less so. Of course, it’s fantastic that the public was inspired by the charisma of marmots to support their research. However, of the roughly 8.7 million species on Earth, the UN’s biodiversity panel has warned that a million face extinction. Many will disappear without ever being named. A crowdfunding campaign can make a marmot, which isn’t currently on the brink of extinction, go viral. But, it can’t fund the unglamorous fieldwork that would find the beetle, frog or fungus nobody has heard of.
When faced with a choice between a bold, public campaign and the loss of 64 years of data, the researchers chose wisely. However, shareability is not a substitute for selection by scientific value, and virality does not mean financial security. Jamba Juice may well have banked enough fat to survive another winter. Whether the researchers have is another matter.
