OnlyMarms: Scientists Put Marmots on OnlyFans to Save 60 Years of Research
What would you do if the government slashed your research funding? Grumble on Twitter? Write a strongly worded letter? Maybe hold a bake sale?
A team of UCLA-affiliated scientists at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado chose a different path. They put marmots on OnlyFans.
Welcome to OnlyMarms — a subscription page featuring "family-friendly" videos of wild marmots whistling, foraging, and generally being the rotund, squeaky ground squirrels they've always been. Except now they're also saving a 60-year-old scientific legacy one paw at a time.
Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
The Marmot Project has been running continuously for more than six decades — the second-longest study of individually identified wild mammals in the world. It's the kind of patient, undramatic science that doesn't make headlines unless something goes wrong. And something did go wrong: federal budget cuts hit university research grants, and suddenly the marmots needed a side hustle.
Enter Dan Blumstein, the UCLA professor leading the project. Rather than watch six decades of longitudinal data wither on the vine, the team launched OnlyMarms at the end of May 2026. The response? Over $6,000 raised in the first two months — before OnlyFans took their 20% cut, leaving the lab with about $4,800.
That's not nothing. For a project tracking individual marmot life histories across generations — births, deaths, social dynamics, hibernation patterns — every dollar keeps a field researcher in the mountains a little longer.
The Internet, Predictably, Lost Its Mind
News of OnlyMarms went stratospheric. The New York Times covered it. The BBC covered it. People magazine gave it the exclusive treatment. And the internet, of course, did what the internet does: it made memes, subscribed out of sheer delight, and asked the obvious question — is this allowed under OnlyFans' terms of service?
(Apparently yes, as long as the marmots aren't doing anything the platform would consider adult content. Marmots, it turns out, are surprisingly wholesome content creators.)
The irony is exquisite. OnlyFans — a platform built on the premise that people will pay for intimate access — is now hosting a channel where the most scandalous thing on display is a marmot eating a dandelion. Somewhere, a venture capitalist is updating a pitch deck about "creator economy adjacencies in wildlife research."
Why This Matters More Than You Think
This isn't just a cute story about fat rodents with a side hustle. It's a damning indictment of how we fund fundamental science. The fact that one of the world's longest-running mammal studies has to resort to a subscription content platform to stay afloat says everything about the gap between what we claim to value (knowledge, long-term data, ecological understanding) and what we actually pay for.
Blumstein and his team are making the best of a bad hand. They're clever, they're adapting, and they've given the internet something genuinely delightful. But let's not pretend this is a sustainable model for scientific research. Next time a politician cuts university funding and asks why the next generation of ecologists isn't better prepared, the answer might just involve a very confused marmot wondering where its grant money went.
Subscribe to OnlyMarms. Save some science. Get shown a marmot. It's the best deal on the internet right now.