Scientists studying marmots in Colorado launched an OnlyFans page to save their research

Colorado’s marmots are on OnlyFans… And that isn’t a joke!

A team of UCLA scientists who study yellow-bellied marmots at a field station in Colorado — a research program that has been running continuously since 1962, making it one of the longest wildlife studies on the planet — has turned to OnlyFans to keep the lights on after federal science funding took a hit. The page, brilliantly nicknamed “OnlyMarms,” features videos of chunky, cat-sized ground squirrels doing exactly what marmots do: sitting on rocks, sunbathing, waddling around and occasionally being photographed with their babies. The team promises all content is clean and family-friendly, which is a sentence that has probably never been written about an OnlyFans page before.

Professor Daniel Blumstein said the idea came during a slow morning at the field station, when the team was just sitting around waiting for marmots to do something interesting — which, if you’ve ever watched a marmot, can take a while. The page has since brought in a small but steady stream of donations to help fund the research, proving that the internet will, in fact, pay money to watch a round animal sit in the sun. Colorado’s tourism slogan should probably just be updated to “Come for the mountains, stay for the content.”

For anyone who’s hiked a fourteener in Colorado, marmots need no introduction. They’re the pudgy, whistling, unapologetically lazy critters that live above treeline and have been photobombing summit selfies since long before Instagram existed.

The fact that a 64-year-old Colorado wildlife study is now being funded by a platform best known for very different content is either a sign of the times or the most Colorado fundraising pivot in history. Either way, the marmots don’t seem to mind.