Climate-Threatened Marmot Research Turns to 'Fat Marmot Week' for Survival

High in the Colorado mountains, where yellow-bellied marmots burrow into rocky slopes and hikers often spot them perched on boulders, something catastrophic happened last winter. Two-thirds of one research population died while hibernating—not from predators or disease, but from cold. The snow that should have blanketed their burrows and insulated them through the long sleep never came. Researchers started the season with over 160 animals. They emerged to find 60.

The marmots that survived are doing what marmots do best: eating. They're fattening themselves for the months ahead, doubling their body weight to as much as 13 pounds in preparation for hibernation. This year, that fattening has become the subject of something called Fat Marmot Week—a voting contest launching Monday that borrows its playful spirit from Fat Bear Week, the annual online celebration of Alaskan brown bears gorging themselves for winter. But beneath the fun lies something more urgent: a research program running out of money.

The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, about 20 miles south of Aspen, has been studying these marmots continuously since 1962. It is one of the world's longest-running investigations of individual mammals, a 64-year archive of behavior, survival, and adaptation. Dan Blumstein, who leads the project, describes the current moment with dark humor. "In some sense, we're going to be laughing our way down as the Titanic sinks," he said. "Because what else are you going to do?" Federal funding cuts have already forced his UCLA department to lose a third of its graduate students. Fat Marmot Week is an attempt to reverse that trajectory—to make the marmots famous enough that people will donate.

A marmot is a cat-sized ground squirrel, a creature with personality and preference. Some are bold, willing to be trapped multiple times in a single morning by researchers using wire boxes baited with oats and peanut butter. Others are wary, avoiding capture altogether. They are "flexibly social," meaning some live in colonies of up to 30 animals while others choose solitude. Graduate students like Katie Adler and Emily Renkey can often identify individual marmots just by watching how they move and interact. When hibernating, a marmot becomes something almost alien—its body temperature plummets from human-normal to as low as 41 degrees Fahrenheit, its breathing slows to once or twice per minute. "You pick up a hibernating marmot and it's this fuzzy ball and it feels like a cold rock with fur," Blumstein said. "It's completely surreal."

Last winter's snow drought was the worst on record in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which spans Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico. Climate change made such a drought 14 times more likely, according to a new study. The warm temperatures and sparse snowfall meant marmot burrows never got their protective blanket. The animals froze. But the consequences ripple far beyond the mountains. The snowmelt from these peaks feeds the Colorado River, which supplies drinking water to farmers and communities across the region. "What happens in these mountains doesn't stay in these mountains," Renkey said. "It impacts all of us."

The researchers have become creative in their desperation. They post marmot videos to OnlyFans, an adult content platform, and a fan created a cryptocurrency called $OnlyMarms, donating transaction fees to the research program—raising around $100,000 so far. Fat Marmot Week will feature individual marmots like Stonehenge, who chirps at mountain bikers, and Citroen, whose mate leads the matriarchal colony. The team needs to secure three years of funding—over $200,000—to ensure the study continues next summer. The marmots themselves have no say in whether the research that has tracked their lives for six decades will survive. That decision rests with people who have never seen them, who live far downstream, who will vote for their favorites in a contest designed to make them care.