Funding for scientific research in the United States is at a record low after the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in research grants last year, derailing work focused on diversity, climate change, and other hot-button topics.

For Daniel Blumstein, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles, those changes reflect a wider priority shift that has caused support for his work to slowly dwindle. For years, Blumstein has overseen one of the longest-running studies of free-living mammals in the world, focused on yellow-bellied marmots in central Colorado. 

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Marmots — soccer ball-sized rodents — are easily tagged and captured, highly social and vocal, and don’t move vast distances, all of which makes them an ideal species to study over time. And since 1962, generations of “Marmoteers” have observed these animals to learn about everything from their social behavior to their communication to how they’ll adapt to climate change.

This summer, the lab is hosting its first Fat Marmot Week, where the public can vote on the chunkiest rodent.

Researchers have been studying generations of these ground mammals for decades.

Fearing that a lack of funding might terminate the program, Blumstein recently got his lab together and they came up with a creative, if highly unorthodox solution: They started an OnlyFans account. 

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The site, more commonly associated with adult content, is increasingly a haven for other types of creators, of which scientists make up a very small fraction. Today, you can subscribe to OnlyMarms, which promises “Unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from........

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