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First Ever Fat Marmot Week Launches in Colorado to Fund Research

Fat Marmot Week, a playful contest modeled on Fat Bear Week, begins Monday in Colorado to raise money for long-running marmot research after federal funding cuts.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-22 05:26

Researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, are hosting the online event, which invites the public to vote for their favorite fattened marmot. The contest is mostly for fun, but it has a serious side: supporting a study that has run since 1962, making it one of the world’s longest-running investigations of individual mammals.

Last winter was brutal for the yellow-bellied marmots in the Colorado high country. Researchers say two-thirds of one population died while hibernating because of insufficient snow cover, which normally insulates their burrows. “We had over 160 animals and we ended with 60 at the start of this season,” said Daniel Blumstein, the UCLA researcher who leads the study. “Most of them died because of the lack of snow cover.”

This year’s snowpack was the worst on record in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which includes Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. A new study confirmed that the human-caused climate crisis made the snow drought about 14 times more likely.

Marmots are cat-sized, furry ground squirrels that live in burrows. In the Rocky Mountains, yellow-bellied marmots are plentiful, and hikers often spot them perched on boulders. The researchers say the animals have distinct personalities and are “flexibly social,” with some thriving in colonies of up to 30 and others preferring solitude.

“We kind of understand these marmots just by looking at them sometimes, because we can kind of tell who’s who just by how they behave and how they interact with one another,” said Katie Adler, a doctoral student at UCLA.

Some marmots are wary of researchers’ traps baited with oats and peanut butter, but others are easy to catch, noted Emily Renkey, a UCLA master’s student.

Unlike hibernating bears, which can wake occasionally, marmots enter a far deeper torpor. Their body temperature drops to as low as 41F (5C), and they breathe once a minute or two. “You pick up a hibernated marmot and it’s this fuzzy ball and it feels like a cold rock with fur. It’s completely surreal,” Blumstein said.

To prepare, the animals double their weight to as much as 13 pounds (6 kilograms), then lose all that bulk during six months or more of hibernation.

The study’s researchers affectionately call themselves “marmoteers.” Funding cuts have caused Blumstein’s UCLA department to lose one-third of its graduate students, prompting creative fundraising efforts. Among the rodents on display are one nicknamed Stonehenge, who chirps at mountain bikers, and another dubbed Citroen, whose mate is a leader of this matriarchal marmot motherland. Voting opens Monday. Researchers have also posted marmot videos to the OnlyFans adult content platform, and one “super fan” created a meme coin.