Q&A: The origin of ‘OnlyMarms’ and what made it a roaring success

The story of Dan Blumstein’s decision to share videos of marmots from the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory field study on an OnlyFans account called OnlyMarms has captured attention around the world over the past few weeks.

Sixty-four years of research into marmots can provide incredible insights into their evolution and socioecology, but the study is as expensive to run as it is valuable—and funding challenges have forced Blumstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA and field chief editor of Frontiers in Conservation Science, to innovate in new and surprising ways.

In this installment of Frontier Scientists, Blumstein explains why this long-running study of yellow-bellied marmots is so important for science, how funding losses are putting it at risk and how he’s fighting back.

What inspired you to become a researcher?

I’ve always been interested in nature and spent a lot of time outside—exploring, watching animals, hiking, climbing and skiing while growing up. As an undergraduate, I realized that there were careers in this area and that, if you were lucky, you could study animal behavior as a profession. I was very lucky!

Can you tell us about the research you’re currently working on?

As a behavioral ecologist and conservation scientist, I do a lot of different things. I’m fascinated by how animals can coexist (or not) with humans and am involved in a number of studies trying to understand these relationships. I think deeply about how insights from behavioral biology can be applied to wildlife management and conservation.

I also co-direct the world’s second-longest study that follows the fate of individually distinguishable, free-living mammals—the yellow-bellied marmots that live in and around the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory near Crested Butte, Colorado. It was started in 1962 by Ken Armitage, and we’ve been following the fate of individually marked marmots ever since. Jane Goodall started studying chimpanzees in Tanzania in 1960.

Long-term studies create their own value. It’s only through long-term ecological studies that we can study evolution in action and understand the nature of plasticity—which is one of the most important things to study in an era of major environmental change. Long-term studies educate people! At the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab (RMBL), we have a K-gray education program, and I’m honored to be able to mentor several super-smart and motivated students each year.

The graduate training opportunities that come from long-term studies are profound, since students can jump in and have years of data to work with or years of insights that permit them to design focused new experiments. Long-term studies also provide amazing opportunities for scientific outreach.

In your opinion, why is your research into marmots important?

Productive long-term studies are important! I believe ours has been productive. For instance, we’ve learned that different factors influence winter and summer survival and that these factors influence animals of different ages and sexes differently. We’ve learned that marmots don’t physiologically age when they hibernate. It was a marmot pup screaming in my hands as I held it gently that took me down a path to understand the sound of fear in animals—including humans.

The yellow-bellied marmots are a wonderful system to ask questions about the adaptive value of sociality because they can live alone or in large, multigenerational, female-dominated social groups called matrilines. This variation permits us to look at the fitness consequences of different social situations.

Indeed, the marmots provide some of the best support in the wild for the somewhat controversial topic of multilevel selection, whereby it’s not just an individual’s position in a social group that has consequences for its survival and reproduction, as we often think; it’s also the structure of the entire group. In other words, marmots do better when they live in groups that have certain structures—the same way that workers in a company may do better if their company has a certain structure.

How did OnlyMarms come about?

I spend a lot of time in meadows waiting for marmots to do things, and it’s a good place to think. Mulling over our funding problems and having recently watched the Apple TV show Margo’s Got Money Troubles about a single mom who resorts to OnlyFans to support her family, I realized that marmots have money troubles, too. I pitched the idea to my lab, someone screamed out OnlyMarms, and we all laughed. Then my graduate student Emily helped me set it up.

It’s a perfect place to post some of the really neat videos we’re collecting from game cameras as part of a study to see if we can identify emotional states in animals from videos. And, since we’re all into science communication, it may be spreading our impact to those who do not typically read science stories!

Can you tell us about the challenges you face funding your work on marmots?

Several things are at play. Julien (my co-director) and I are struggling to get ongoing National Science Foundation support as the NSF is reallocating funds from “the environment” and “life sciences” to AI research. At the same time, universities, especially UCLA, are facing severe cuts in federal funding and are enrolling fewer graduate students.

Our department lost a third of our teaching assistant positions, which are used to support graduate students, and we’re shifting from a model where a number of students are supported by the department to a more biomedical model, where the principal investigators must provide most of the support. Given that our kind of grants are extremely difficult to get and are often smaller than biomedical grants … well, I think you can see the problem.

And we need overlapping generations of UCLA graduate students in the field for our five-month field season to keep the project going. I’m there about two and a half months a year, but I can’t be there all five months.

Is OnlyMarms helping with the funding challenges?

People have been extremely generous! We’ve made about $5,000 from OnlyMarms, although we need closer to $75,000 a year to support a grad student. But, in the process of figuring out how to get the money to UCLA, UCLA has finally made it easier to accept small donations directly to my lab. We’ve made much more from these tax-deductible donations.

And the memecoin community launched something completely novel—$onlymarms—a memecoin that’s traded on the pump.fun platform, where the transaction fees are going directly to support our work. We’re closing in on having earned more than $100,000 from this alone! The memecoin community views this as a novel model for generating funding for deserving projects! Super exciting.

I’m working hard to keep this study alive.

Who’s behind this story?

Swati Mestri

Swati Mestri holds a bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering and has worked as a content editor since 2019. She has experience editing research documents across technology, health care, and materials science, and has a particular interest in technology and space.

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Andrew Zinin

Master’s in physics with research experience. Long-time science news enthusiast. Plays key role in Science X’s editorial success.

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