Marmot researchers launch 'OnlyMarms' to keep a 65-year study alive as U.S. science budgets shrink

The yellow-bellied marmots of the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory have been watched, weighed, and written down every summer since 1962. Researchers at the field station near Crested Butte, Colorado can recognize individual animals by ear tags, fur dye, and natural markings, and they have logged what each one did for more than six decades of summers. The data has tracked population dynamics, social behavior, and anti-predator behavior across nearly every adult animal that has lived in the colony.

Project leaders call it "the second-oldest continuous study of individually marked mammals in the world." On June 17, the team that runs it started posting the footage on the OnlyFans account they have branded "OnlyMarms".

The idea came to Blumstein during a quiet morning in the field. "I spend a lot of time waiting for marmots to do things and had the idea one slow morning," he told the project's supporters. "When I came back with this idea, one of my graduate students immediately said we MUST do this! So here we are" Live Science.

The OnlyFans account is the visible part of a deeper structural problem.

A standard federal research grant in the United States lasts about three years. A long-term individually marked mammal study only starts returning the kind of data that no short-term project can match after a decade or more, because the value of the record compounds: the more years a single animal is watched, the more useful its history becomes for testing hypotheses about aging, climate response, social structure, and population collapse. Blumstein's project has been recording individual marmot behavior since 1962. Its data is more valuable in its 65th year than it was in its 5th.

Federal grant cycles are designed to fund new questions, not to underwrite the depreciation of a long-term dataset that already exists. When those cycles tighten, the funding gap lands on the field assistants. If they cannot be paid, the summer's observations go unrecorded, and a year of compounding data is lost. The answer was to find a revenue stream that does not depend on a federal grant cycle. Graduate student Renkey is working on the project.

A 2025 essay in PLOS Biology titled "The end of long-term ecological data?" documents the broader pattern. The authors, who include Blumstein and collaborators, warn that the United States is losing multi-decade ecological monitoring programs at a rate the current funding system cannot replace, and that the data those programs have produced cannot be recreated once the field seasons stop. The marmot project is one of the longest survivors in that category, not the average case. Its pivot to OnlyFans is a symptom of the same structural pressure the essay describes.

The project's UCLA support page continues to list conventional giving channels, and the team has not published a subscription price or a fundraising target for OnlyMarms. A profile in the Riverfront Times carries additional Blumstein quotes on the bind.

The next test of the pivot is whether the OnlyMarms revenue covers even one full field season at the RMBL site. If it does, expect more long-term ecology groups to copy the model. If it does not, the 2027 season at RMBL will depend on whatever the federal budget looks like by then.