UCLA's 62-year marmot study raised about $4,000 on OnlyFans. The project also drew unsolicited meme coins on Pump.fun, echoing last year's Moo Deng frenzy. Researchers say they did not create the tokens.
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Scientists behind one of the world's longest-running wildlife studies have turned to OnlyFans to plug a funding gap. The account, called OnlyMarms, has generated about $4,000. The project needs $75,000 to $100,000 a year to support graduate students and fieldwork, fees that federal grants once covered.
UCLA professor Daniel Blumstein launched the account after traditional research funding dried up. A graduate student came up with the name, and the team leaned into the joke by promising subscribers "uncensored marmot content." Blumstein told NPR it has also become a way to reach new audiences.
"Maybe this is a different audience than, you know, most of our science communication reaches," he said. "That's great. Turns out, it's even bigger than this."
The yellow-bellied marmot project has tracked the animals in Colorado since 1962. The OnlyFans account is not the only unconventional revenue stream. Blumstein said the crypto community has embraced the project, with several OnlyMarms-inspired meme coins appearing on Pump.fun. He stressed that the researchers did not create any of them.
"People have independently created a meme coin and told us to grab the transaction – to register it, and then we get the transaction fees. And that is blowing up," he said. "Apparently, this is a meme coin for good that people like."
It would not be the first internet-famous animal to spawn a cryptocurrency. Last year the Solana token Moo Deng, named for a viral pygmy hippo, launched on Pump.fun and briefly reached a market cap near $680 million before landing listings on Coinbase and other major exchanges. The marmot coins are far smaller and have no known link to the UCLA researchers.
The team has also partnered with a Colorado brewery on a "Marmot Tears" IPA and runs a public "Fat Marmot Week" contest.
Blumstein said the situation reflects the state of scientific funding in the United States. Raising money through OnlyFans, he said, is a far cry from how research was paid for when he was a graduate student.
"No. It's appalling," Blumstein said. "What we're doing is destroying the scientific structure and the university-federal partnerships that made us great, made us rich, made us the scientific leaders of the world. It's being taken apart, and that's really sad."
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