Scientists who turned to OnlyFans to help save long-running research into marmots have raised more than $100,000 after harnessing the support of another, very modern, funding avenue – cryptocurrency.
The 60-year project of continuous study of marmots – stout, ground-dwelling rodents that are the largest members of the squirrel family – across the US west was facing termination following science funding cuts imposed by Donald Trump’s administration.
In desperation, researchers in June decided to put the marmots on OnlyFans, the adult-content website, to raise funds. Since then, posts on the new account, named OnlyMarms, have shown marmots scurrying across rocky landscapes and entering their burrows, rather than anything sexually explicit.
“Our goal isn’t really to sexualise the marmots,” said Daniel Blumstein, a professor at UCLA who got the idea after watching Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a TV show based on a novel about a single mother who turns to OnlyFans in order to support herself and her child. “It’s to celebrate the marmots.”
This effort has raised a modest $6,000 for the marmots but a further, much larger, funding boost for the project has recently materialized in the form of a new marmot-themed cryptocurrency. A new “meme coin” named $OnlyMarms was created by outside supporters of the project who donated all transaction fees to the study.
This marmot memecoin, a type of cryptocurrency based on online culture and memes that fluctuates in price cased on viral trends, has raised more than $88,000 in just two weeks. Along with outside donations from marmot allies who were uncomfortable donating through the OnlyFans platform, the research program has gained more than $100,000 in funding, enabling it to continue for a further year.
“It’s been a crazy last two weeks, it’s been incredible to see and it’s a relief that the research can continue for another year,” said Julien Martin, a University of Ottawa researcher who co-leads the project with Blumstein.
“I’m completely amazed that this internet culture that I barely know of has raised so much money. It’s fascinating and shocking to me. Of course I dream for more – if we get $300,000 that will fund a PhD student on the project for the next four years – but for now we are talking about how to make this money stretch as long as possible.”
The memecoin was created by an unknown online community on the Solana blockchain and Martin initially thought it was a scam before accepting that it could raise funds for the study. He added it was “ironic” that researchers were having to turn to cryptocurrency, an area that has personally netted Trump about $635m through his own memecoin, to make up for science funding slashed by Trump’s administration.
The US president has sought to shrink federal scientific funding via the National Science Foundation and has frozen more than $700m in grants in order to reshape the system to suit political and ideological goals, scrapping research that mentions blacklisted terms such as “climate” or “women”.
In April, the administration fired the entire 22-person board that independently oversees the NSF. Michael Kratsios, a Silicon Valley investor and Trump’s science adviser, has since said that the US’s research priorities will focus upon artificial intelligence and robotics rather than life sciences, a dominion that includes the study of wildlife.
This realignment has strangled funding for the marmot study at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), a non-profit field station in the Rocky Mountains near Crested Butte, Colorado.
The study of yellow-bellied marmots, one of the 15 recognized species of marmot in the northern hemisphere, was started by Kenneth Armitage, a University of Kansas academic, in 1962 and has grown to be one of the longest-running animal monitoring projects in the world. The project also has public outreach such as an annual vote for “fat marmot week”, which starts next week.
The documentation of the marmots – researchers are on to their 11th generation of marmot to be spied upon – is important, Martin said, as it has illustrated the warping environment around the creatures as the world heats up due to the burning of fossil fuels.
While the marmots are not in any imminent danger of extinction, they are being affected by the climate crisis. “We’ve seen them increase in body mass as the summers get longer and the winters get shorter – they are getting fatter,” said Martin.
“But the other aspect is we have had a record lack of snowfall in Colorado and we saw a big die-off of marmots, more than we ever saw before,” he added. “The snow cover arrived so late and the extent was so small this past winter. The marmots need the snow as a layer of insulation as they hibernate in their burrows, so without this many of them just froze to death.”
Martin said that continued monitoring was needed to ascertain the impact of the climate crisis on marmots, other wildlife and the broader landscape. While the injection of OnlyFans and crypto cash will keep the marmot project alive for now, he acknowledged it was not an adequate substitute for standard government funding.
“Of course we have been lucky and we might get luckier if the memecoin does even better but I understand it’s not for everyone,” he said. “It worked for us because we were the first. But it has been nice to see crypto be used for good.”
Martin added that “it is a bit of a dream” to at some point see the creation a broader memecoin that could support all sorts of scientific projects, including those not involving marmots at all.