When a struggling marmot research project needed cash, the scientists did something no one would have expected from an academic lab: They launched a subscription page on OnlyFans.
OnlyMarms, as it’s known online, is entirely G-rated — just marmots being marmots — but the platform choice alone was enough to make headlines and pull in roughly $6,000 in necessary funding for the 64-year-old mammal study. (It’s the second-oldest long-term field study of individually identifiable wild mammals, trailing Jane Goodall’s study of chimpanzees by just a couple of years.)
The biggest surprise wasn’t the debate regarding the unusual but successful OnlyMarms fundraising initiative; it was the additional fundraising initiatives that began to spring up as a result.
How OnlyMarms helped kickstart a new fundraising initiative
While funding can be complicated for academic projects, the marmot study’s researchers, Professor Julien Martin and his colleague Professor Daniel Blumstein, knew that funding cuts and lost labour resources meant the study faced an annual shortfall of at least US$300K. After thoughtful (and at times humorous) discussions with their team — of whom more than nine out of ten were women — the researchers agreed to launch the OnlyMarms page on OnlyFans.
“My plan was absolutely no human in the images or videos, not even the shadow of a finger,” explained Martin in an interview with Money.ca. “[OnlyMarms was] only marmots doing marmot things.”
Martin said that he and the team wanted to raise money, but really considered this unusual approach as a way to raise awareness.
“We chose not to use a crowdfunded platform, like GoFundMe, as we would not get the media attention,” he revealed. “It would have slowly died on that platform.”
The OnlyMarms strategy worked. Since its launch in late May, OnlyMarms has generated about $6,000 in funding — but more importantly, it’s raised interest in marmots, the importance of this long-term ecological study and the power of creative outreach.
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New partnerships and more money start flowing in
Quite quickly, Martin and his colleague began to field emails and calls from local businesses looking to partner with the researchers to help raise awareness and funds.
Denver, Colorado’s Upslope Brewing Company reached out to partner with Professors Martin and Blumstein to release a limited-edition OnlyMarms Extra Thicc Double IPA to benefit the long-running, yellow-bellied marmot research project at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory.
The team is now in discussions with another American brewery to launch a year-long, marmot-inspired brew to help raise awareness and funds. Additionally, recognized artists are eager to produce and auction off art-inspired marmot pieces, with proceeds going directly to helping fund the research project.
As excited as Martin and his colleagues are about these initiatives, the most lucrative — and surprising — was the $OnlyMarms memecoin, which is a type of cryptocurrency that fluctuates in price based on viral trends.
The memecoin has raised more than US$120,000 in fees. These “fees” are the total cost paid by $OnlyMarms memecoin investors, a signal that millions of dollars worth of trading volume has passed through the token in just a few months. The creator — in this case, the marmot research project — gets a portion of these fees. As Martin points out, it’s still a significant sum — and it’s net-new funding for a long-term project.
“The memecoin is the initiative with the most potential [to raise critical funds] and the one we expected the least,” he explained.
Why this research matters beyond the marmots
Why bother keeping a long-term research project going, particularly about marmots — a mammal considered “a pest” in some parts of North America?
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As Martin explained, the project has tracked the same Colorado population since 1962, monitoring births, deaths, mating and body weight closely enough to build a genetic record spanning 12 generations. Paired with decades of local snowpack and temperature data, it’s one of the most detailed long-term ecological datasets in the world, and one of fewer than five research systems that are detailed enough to separate genetic effects from environmental ones in real time. That combination makes it a rare window into how a fast-warming mountain ecosystem is actually responding to climate change — data with implications well beyond marmots.
But keeping that window of examination open costs money, and increasingly, more than what granting bodies are willing to cover.
A shrinking pool of money, chasing the same research
Martin says a funding freeze tied to broader University of California budget cuts eliminated the fully funded PhD position his U.S.-based collaborator, Blumstein, used to renew every two years. This forced the team to consider ways to independently raise roughly US$300,000 just to keep training new researchers and maintain the data integrity of this long-term study.
The OnlyFans page was a long shot by design
The team appreciated the concerns of launching a page on the adult-content-friendly platform OnlyFans and made sure to include all stakeholders in the decision before launch. And even with their guardrails — only marmots doing marmot things — their funding expectations were modest. As Martin recalls, they considered $1,000 of extra funds and a bit of media coverage “a success.”
While the team ended up raising quite a bit more than anticipated, it was the coverage from across the world that really made a difference. After the story went viral, fans created an independent meme coin tied to the project, and Martin, who says he “didn’t know anything about crypto” beforehand, began fielding emails offering to route the coin’s creator fees directly to the research project. After verifying the offer wasn’t a scam, he claimed the fees himself, and they’ve kept accumulating since. He’s now working with both the University of Ottawa and UCLA to move the money into the university system with minimal tax friction, while cautioning that the coin’s value is inherently unstable. “It’s a meme coin,” he said, “so it might crash in a week.”
A windfall, not a plan
For now, Martin says the roughly US$120,000 sitting in what he calls the marmot research account gives the project breathing room it didn’t have a few months ago when $OnlyMarms wasn’t a thing. But he’s careful not to treat it as a permanent fix. A meme coin’s value can evaporate as fast as it appeared, and the team is still leaning on brewery partnerships, a university donation page and conventional grant writing to fund the actual science for the long run.
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Romana King, Senior Editor at Money.ca, also writes for various North American publications and the RKHomeowner blog. Her book, House Poor No More, is an Amazon bestseller and five-time award winner, including the 2022 New York CPA Society's Excellence in Financial Journalism (EFJ) Book Award.
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