Daniel Blumstein is worried about money.

Blumstein, a UCLA professor who heads the Marmot Project at Crested Butte’s Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, has seen federal funding he relies on to pay his graduate student researchers dwindle in recent years. 

“Every penny I’ve gotten from the federal government has been helpful, needed and essential. Graduate students are kind of the glue that keeps this thing together,” Blumstein said. 

In 2025, federal grants from the National Science Foundation were at their lowest levels since the mid ’80s, with this year shaping up to be even worse, according to Grant Witness, a project tracking the scientific agency’s funding across projects in the U.S.

The budget shortfall endangers the world’s second-longest-running mammal study. The Marmot Project, started in 1962 by Ken Armitage, is the oldest mammal study behind only Jane Goodall’s chimp research in Tanzania. A grant program officer told Blumstein that the decades-long body of research harmed their grant chances, as they already had sufficient data.

Blumstein and his graduate students disagreed. 

“We’re never going to learn about how the climate is changing if we don’t monitor it over time,” Emily Renkey, a graduate student on the project, said. 

In fact, this year’s data is quite the outlier, with the second largest observed die-off at the Crested Butte marmot colony. 

Out of 160 observed animals from last year, only around 60 made it through the winter. Blumstein said the lack of snowpack allowed the elements to creep into marmot burrows, causing many to freeze to death.

Facing mounting financial woes and with ample field time observing marmots on his hands, Blumstein began to think of ways to raise money for his lab’s research.

“My wife and I recently finished watching “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” and I came back to the lab and said, ‘Well, we have money troubles. Why don’t we start an OnlyFans account and post videos?’,” Blumstein joked.

Renkey had already been creating videos of the marmots, and with a few clicks and a brief petition to OnlyFans, the OnlyMarms page was born. 

“It’s great to see so many people finding new and innovative ways of using the platform,” an OnlyFans spokesperson told Inc.

To date, they’ve raised around $4,000 on the website. Not enough to fund a graduate student, but demonstrating an increased public interest in the group’s research. Since launching the page, Blumstein and the group have been published in the New York Times, NPR, the LA Times and plenty more.

The group, which calls itself the Marmoteers, also partnered with a local brewery to create a beer, launched a memecoin and is creating a social media campaign called ‘Fat Marmot Week’ to recognize the chunkiest of their research subjects.