Calif. researchers turn to OnlyFans as their funding dries up

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. 

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.

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. 

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 the Rockies” delivered as near-daily photos and videos of chubby, personable marmots (with charming names like Staple, Pawprint, and Cabinet) that give Jimothy the raccoon a run for his money. Viewers can leave monetary “tips” on each post, which are split between the platform and the poster. 

It shouldn’t have come to this, the scientists say. But here’s how it did. When Blumstein took over the marmot project from its founder in 2001, funding was relatively easy to come by. For more than a decade, the project received most of its support from the National Science Foundation, one of the country’s largest funding agencies. But when he tried to renew the grant for another 10 years, he was denied three times before the agency told him to stop applying. 

“After the third time, our program officer told my colleague ... that they will never fund us because they think we have too much data,” Blumstein said in an email. “I don’t even know how to parse that sentence. It’s nuts.”

Long-term projects such as this one ask “some of the most important questions in our time,” Blumstein said, but have been among the first programs cut. It’s a hard sell, Blumstein continued, to justify the need for continuous, robust datasets, but such resources are invaluable when it comes to studying evolutionary processes that play out over generations and for generating sound science for policymakers and land managers. He’s watched their budget shrink with trepidation.

The choice to make an OnlyFans page was just one of a number of out-of-the-box ideas they came up with to refill their coffers. Earlier this month, Crested Butte brewer Irwin Brewing Co. released a “Marmot Tears” IPA in partnership with the lab, with proceeds from its sale benefiting the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, which the marmot program is run out of. 

Emily Renkey, a first-year master’s student in Blumstein’s lab, was the one to start the OnlyFans account, and the one who today posts its content. She first joined the project as a volunteer in 2022, and became so enamored with marmots that she chose to study them for her degree, which investigates behavioral and cognitive differences between individual marmots and what this could mean for their conservation.

Renkey was already setting up cameras to monitor the animals, and so now she combs through the footage for examples of interesting (or very cute) marmot behavior. “Sometimes I’m just posting the videos I think will get the most ‘aws,’” she said. “But my favorite is when I find footage of a particular behavior and I can use that to educate people.”

So far, OnlyMarms has netted the lab a few hundred dollars, which is enough to purchase the bait that lures the marmots close enough to study. The lab is continuing to pursue more traditional funding opportunities even as it runs on reserves that Blumstein has saved over time, but he tells SFGATE he plans to move forward with these more unusual approaches too.

Starting today, the lab is kicking off Fat Marmot Week — an homage to the widely popular Fat Bear Week, run each year by the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Each Monday and Friday, the project plans to roll out contenders for the title of fattest marmot before voting opens to the public on Aug. 24. 

As silly as these efforts have been, Blumstein said it’s important to remember that scientists across the country are stretched thin, and that these efforts shouldn’t be necessary. “Ultimately, we should be spending our time writing papers, not thinking up out of the box ways to get funding.”

While Renkey agrees that scientists shouldn’t have to fear their projects being slashed due to a lack of funding, she does see value in their efforts. While it’s true, she said, that running OnlyMarms and Fat Marmot Week takes time, engaging with the public has always been a worthy goal. 

“I don't know if I agree with the idea that scientists shouldn't have to be opportunistic and creative. I think that’s a lot of what science and research is,” she said. “It can be intimidating to engage with the public like this, but why are we doing this work if not to help forward humanity with it?”