How Marmots, OnlyFans and a Meme Coin Generated Big Bucks for Wildlife Biology

From our collaborating partner “Living on Earth,” public radio’s environmental news magazine, an interview by Jenni Doering with Emily Renkey from the Marmot Project. 

You may have heard of Fat Bear Week, the annual contest where the public gets to vote on who they think is the fattest bear gorging on salmon in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. In other words, who’s best prepared for a long cold winter. 

But move over, grizzlies, because recently the public was also asked to weigh in on the fattest yellow-bellied marmot at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado. 

The researchers of the Marmot Project decided to launch Fat Marmot Week this year to raise awareness of these large ground squirrels, and drum up support for sustaining their decades-long research project.

The winner of this contest was a male named Dawn, who not only won the public’s heart but also objectively weighed in as the heaviest marmot in the bracket.

Emily Renkey is a graduate student at UCLA in the Dan Blumstein Lab, which runs the Marmot Project and is coming up with all kinds of creative ways to fundraise and spread a love of yellow-bellied marmots. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

EMILY RENKEY: Fat Marmot Week was inspired by Fat Bear Week. They are the OGs for sure. We had been talking about it as a lab for a few years. This year we finally had it come to fruition. And as our first year, we chose eight adult marmots, and they all have their own story. So they made good competitors for the public.

JENNI DOERING: Tell us about the winner. I believe his name is Dawn.

RENKEY: Yes, Dawn. He is about 7 years old. He’s the familiar face when we ski in, in April; he’s one of the first marmots up, usually. He’ll go around and dig out all of his ladies. He wakes up before them, and then he goes to the hibernacula, or the burrows that the females overwinter in, and he wakes all of them up to start socializing. He is the father of maybe four litters this year, so he is an impressive father, and he’s also a father who sticks around. He is a very caring dad. We’ve seen him carry dried plants to his pups, but he also was especially huge this year. In May, we were talking about how fat he was, and seeing him, it was kind of hard not to do a fat marmot week.

DOERING: What is his personality like?

RENKEY: In our description, we say Dawn is a very special boy who likes to eat rocks. Marmots really like salt, and sometimes I think they’ll chew on rocks to get any of the minerals out of them. He is so large he does not have a neck. He will kind of saunter over to the traps that we will put bait into to try and catch and mark him and collect data, and he really likes to push them over. So he’s gotten very good at problem-solving when retrieving the bait. 

He is often seen tail flagging, which is a scent-marking behavior that they use to kind of show their dominance, so you can often tell it’s him even if he is not marked because he will helicopter his tail as he’s walking around from burrow to burrow. He’s very fun to observe.

DOERING: How do you actually weigh him and study him if he knocks over these traps?

RENKEY: It is a constant battle. He is always outsmarting us. There are some others that outsmart us as well. We often say the marmots are willing participants in their own research, and he was choosing not to participate for the first part of the summer. But, eventually, he did go into the trap. They know what they’re doing when they go into the trap. Sometimes they’ll try and step over the plate that triggers the door. But maybe he got a little carried away eating the bait, so he eventually decided to weigh in, which means that he walked into a trap, and then we were able to weigh him from there. 

DOERING: Just how much weight did he gain?

RENKEY: We estimate his mass in both June and August. In June he started at about 8.6 pounds, and then he ended the season on Aug. 15 at about 13 pounds. That’s a pretty impressive number for a yellow-bellied marmot. That’s a very large cat.

DOERING: That’s ultimately all pounds that will help him get through the next winter, right?

RENKEY: Absolutely, he needs all that fat to burn so he can stay warm until next spring.

DOERING: You’re a master’s student with the Marmot Project, this long-standing research project about yellow-bellied marmots. How long has the project been running, and what types of research has the project done?

RENKEY: I am a first-year master’s student, yes, and this is my fourth season with the project. I was a volunteer for a few years, but the project has been running since 1962. So this is about our 65th year monitoring the marmot population at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab. We have asked a lot of big questions, so a lot of what we’ve looked at in the past is the sociality of marmots. We call marmots flexibly social, or yellow-bellied marmots flexibly social, and that basically means that they vary in their sociality, and it doesn’t necessarily impact their survival. Some marmots live alone. Some marmots live in big groups with other marmots, and then some marmots will switch their strategy, where they’ll live alone one year and then with a bigger group the next year. 

We also have looked at cumulative adversity in marmots, which basically just means how marmots who experience multiple hardships when they’re really young are less likely to survive later in life. We know that’s the case with people, right? If you’ve experienced a lot of hardship, it can really impact you later in life, and we know now that’s true for wild animals as well. And we have a paper coming out soon that I’m working on with another current grad student that looks at how that cumulative adversity impacts their behavior. So not only does it change their survival, but it also changes how they behave as adults.

DOERING: Fat Marmot Week ended up raising a chunk of money for the project, partially through OnlyFans, which might be surprising to hear. That’s a site usually reserved for adult content. Can you talk to me about the OnlyMarms account, how that got started?

RENKEY: The head of our lab, Dan, has been struggling with funding for a few years now, and so one day he was sitting waiting for the marmots to emerge, and he had watched the show “Margo’s Got Money Troubles” the night before, which is a show about a woman who makes an OnlyFans account to raise money, and she makes a lot of money. And so, I think he kind of was like, “Well, marmots have money troubles, also. Why not start an OnlyFans account for our marmots?” But yeah, we’ve been using it since. We have about 2,600 subscribers at this point. We’ve made a few thousand dollars, which is awesome. It’s been really exciting to see the OnlyFans response.

DOERING: The OnlyMarms account led to the creation of a meme coin, a type of cryptocurrency. How does that work, and how is it benefiting the Marmot Project?

RENKEY: Honestly, I feel like it just keeps getting more absurd. These are all things that I did not think I would be talking about in my master’s degree, but there are a lot of creative people out there. And the meme coin was by no means our idea. In fact, I did not think that it was real the first few times people reached out to me about it. But a community that exchanges meme coin, which is this form of cryptocurrency based on virality, basically came to us and said they had made this meme coin and that we could claim the meme coin and that would allow us to collect fees when people buy and sell it. And so, I think the legitimacy of us claiming the coin actually led a lot more people to invest in it, and they’ve made this whole “meme coin for good” movement, where there’s a lot of people I think interested in trading this coin because it helps our project. We’ve raised over $140,000 at this point in transaction fees, which is a crazy amount of money. What I will say is, it is not the community we expected to rally behind us, but we are very grateful for them, and it has been a really cool opportunity to see people who maybe don’t typically engage with wildlife biology rally behind us.

DOERING: Yellow-bellied marmots—they’re not endangered, which is great to hear, when these days we hear about so many animals in trouble. They’re of least concern in terms of conservation. So why study them if there are so many other species in a lot greater danger of extinction?

RENKEY: That’s a great question. Working with a population that is of least concern allows us to ask big questions using our marmots as a model system. A model system just means that yellow-bellied marmots share a lot in common with other species. They’re mammals. They hibernate. They’re flexibly social, so we can ask a lot of different questions about sociality. And they’re relatively easy to study. They live long for a rodent, but not as long as an elephant. So we can understand these shifts in population, right? We’re seeing multiple generations over time. All of these things allow us to use the marmots to ask big questions that then we can extrapolate to other populations. And then, they directly help with management of other species.

DOERING: What’s an example of how the marmot model can be used to help other species?

RENKEY: The Vancouver Island marmot is like a very closely related example of an endangered population that our work can hopefully help inform the management of. We have done all of this work to understand marmot behavior and marmot survival. The Vancouver Island Marmot Recovery Project is working with this population of a few dozen animals; they almost went extinct. They had just a handful of animals left, and they have taken some of them into captivity. They can use, in addition to all of their hard work and research that they’ve done on the Vancouver Island marmot, they have this plethora of knowledge from our study system to inform the recovery plan for the species.

DOERING: It sounds like yellow-bellied marmots, they’re doing OK. At the same time, our environment is rapidly changing, and Colorado has seen its fair share of wildfires and warming and melting. How is the marmots’ environment changing, and how might that impact them in the future?

RENKEY: Usually when we arrive in April, we ski in to our field station. This year, we walked on bare ground the entire way, which was really crazy. The past winter there was no snow in this part of Colorado, and that led to a huge die-off in our population. We ended the fall of last year with 160 animals, approximately, and then we saw about 60 emerge this year. 

That is in large part due to the lack of snow cover. The snow acts as this insulating blanket for the marmots, so they’re not exposed to dramatic changes in temperature while they’re hibernating. When there’s no snow, the temperature fluctuates pretty dramatically, so that will lead the marmots to burn more fat than they otherwise would to stay warm. We had this huge die-off because so many marmots were burning more fat than they typically would have to; a lot of them died before they could emerge and start eating again. There are still a lot of questions around how exactly the climate is impacting the marmots, but we have now some examples of what could happen with these more dramatic changes in climate that we’re experiencing.