Marmots facing money troubles turn to OnlyFans

Marmots - chubby, ground-dwelling squirrels - are the latest stars on the adult platform OnlyFans.

That's thanks to the efforts of Colorado-based biologist Dr Daniel Blumstein, the head of a long-running field study on marmots, who was worried about its financial future after federal funding to universities was cut.

Blumstein told the BBC he recently launched an account on OnlyFans, which is known mostly for sexually explicit content, and began posting "uncensored marmot content" in "an act of desperation".

This content is family-friendly videos of the rodents scurrying around and popping out of their burrows, which so far has generated more than $5,000 (£3,712).

After OnlyFans takes its share, the UCLA-affiliated Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Colorado will make about $4,000.

The Marmot Project, which has been running for more than 60 years, is the second-longest study of individually identified mammals in the world, after Jane Goodall's chimpanzee study in Tanzania.

It studies the yellow-bellied marmot, one of the 15 recognised species of marmot found in the Northern Hemisphere.

Because the species is neither threatened nor endangered, it helps scientists to understand the factors that drive population changes, according to the lab.

Blumstein said long-term studies such as these are really effective but, despite this, he has been unable to secure federal support.

While the lab will probably not be able to generate enough money through OnlyFans to save the project from spending cuts, he believes raising awareness about their work is also important.

The OnlyFans idea came to him when he sat in a meadow waiting for some marmots to pop out of the ground.

Blumstein had recently watched the TV show Margot's Got Money Troubles, where Elle Fanning's character starts an OnlyFans account to support herself as a single mother.

"Marmots' got money troubles," he thought to himself. "Maybe we should do something a little risqué".

He raised the idea with his lab students, and they came up with the name OnlyMarms. One student helped him set up the account.

That's when he hit a slight snag. He had to upload a photo of his driver's licence to verify his identity. But the platform flagged that he did not look like the account's profile photo of a marmot. A quick email exchange cleared the way for them to start posting videos.

On OnlyMarms, users can see the Rocky Mountain marmots in their natural habitat. They aren't as social as their alpine counterparts, Blumstein said, and the female marmots get grumpier as they age.

In one video, a female marmot chases away a male who got too comfortable in her burrow. In another, a female is dubbed "the queen of the town" as she is caught on camera in the sun.

The lab doesn't give their subjects human-sounding names, in an effort to avoid bias in their research. Instead, they mark the rodents with dye and call them things like "dans_hat", "open_kite" and "Citroën".

The scientists have also launched Fat Marmot Week, styled after Fat Bear Week, where the public can vote for their favourite rotund rodent in a bracket-style tournament at the end of August. As hibernating animals, marmots put on weight before winter.

"It's fun to root for the chunkiest marmot, but behind the fun and games is a deathly serious competition against nature to pile on fat to survive the long, cold winter," Blumstein said in a press release announcing the tournament.