Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have taken an unusual route to keep one of the world's longest-running wildlife studies funded, launching an OnlyFans account called OnlyMarms to support a yellow-bellied marmot project in Colorado that has been running since 1962.
According to Decrypt, the idea took shape as traditional research funding became harder to secure. Daniel Blumstein, a UCLA professor involved in the project, said a graduate student came up with the name OnlyMarms, and the team embraced the joke by offering subscribers what it called "uncensored marmot content." Blumstein told NPR the account has also opened the door to an audience that typical science outreach may not reach.
"Maybe this is a different audience than, you know, most of our science communication reaches," Blumstein said in the NPR interview. "That's great. Turns out, it's even bigger than this."
OnlyMarms has brought in about $4,000
The account has generated about $4,000 so far. Blumstein said the research effort ultimately needs between $75,000 and $100,000 a year to fund graduate students and fieldwork, support that used to come from federal grants.
The project has also started drawing interest from the crypto crowd.
OnlyMarms-inspired meme coins appear on Pump.fun
Several meme coins tied to the OnlyMarms theme have shown up on Pump.fun. It is not clear who created them, and it is also unclear whether any of them are connected to the UCLA research team. Blumstein told NPR that the researchers did not create the tokens.
"People have independently created a meme coin and told us to grab the transaction—to register it, and then we get the transaction fees. And that is blowing up," he said. "Apparently, this is a meme coin for good that people like."
This is not the first case of an internet-famous animal feeding into a crypto token narrative.
In 2024, Moo Deng, a Solana token based on the viral pygmy hippo, launched on Pump.fun. The token briefly reached a market capitalization of about $680 million before later securing listings on major exchanges including Coinbase.
Fundraising now extends beyond subscriptions
The researchers have also partnered with a Colorado brewery to release a "Marmot Tears" IPA. They have also launched a public "Fat Marmot Week" competition.
Blumstein criticizes the state of US science funding
Blumstein said the episode reflects the condition of scientific funding in the United States. In his view, the fact that researchers now have to raise money through platforms such as OnlyFans stands far from the way research projects were funded when he was in graduate school.
"No. It's appalling," he said. "What we're doing is destroying the scientific structure and the university-federal partnerships that made us great, made us rich, made us the scientific leaders of the world. It's being taken apart, and that's really sad."