Scientists Couldn't Get Funding To Study Marmots So They Started An OnlyFans

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado has been tracking yellow-bellied marmots in and around the high-altitude town since 1962, making it the second-longest-running study of free-living mammals in the world after Jane Goodall's chimpanzee research, and producing decades of data on how animals communicate, form social bonds, evade predators, and respond to climate change. For much of the past decade, the study was funded by the National Science Foundation. Then the NSF, under the current administration's sweeping freeze of more than $700 million in research grants, told UCLA ecology professor Daniel Blumstein to stop applying after three unsuccessful renewal attempts, offering as its reason the statement that his program had too much data, a sentence Blumstein said he genuinely did not know how to parse. That's when Emily Renkey, a first-year master's student in Blumstein's lab, had an idea. She opened an OnlyFans account called OnlyMarms, promising, in the account's description, unfiltered yellow-bellied marmot content from the Rockies. The account is entirely G-rated. The marmots are extremely cute.

Renkey said she posts whatever footage she thinks will get the most audience response, but her personal favorite content is when she finds footage of a specific behavior and uses it to teach subscribers something about marmot biology. The early success of OnlyMarms has also inspired a separate fundraising initiative called Fat Marmot Week, running August 24 through 29, modeled on Alaska's beloved Fat Bear Week and inviting the public to vote for their favorite marmot contestant and donate to the research program as they do. The first confirmed contestant is a female marmot named Dan's Hat, described on the official Fat Marmot Week website as the cool aunt who's part of Stonehenge's matriline. Blumstein, for his part, said scientists should ideally be spending their time writing papers rather than devising creative funding workarounds, which is a fair point. But Renkey pushes back gently: she believes public engagement is a worthwhile part of what science is, and that if the work is not ultimately shared with and supported by the people outside the laboratory, it is harder to argue for its value. The marmots, who have been studied since 1962 and have helped scientists understand how animals adapt to a warming planet, are entirely unaware of any of this. They are busy eating and getting fat for winter.

Source:https://www.goodgoodgood.co/articles/research-marmots-only-fans-trump-budget-cuts