Monday marks the debut of what researchers hope will be the next big wildlife-watching craze: Fat Marmot Week. Yes, the internet's favorite pastime of voting on chubby animals is expanding its portfolio beyond bears to include rodents.
Last winter was brutal for marmots in the Colorado mountains, where researchers say two-thirds of one population died while hibernating due to insufficient snow cover. Those that survived are now doing what any sensible creature would: fattening up for the first-ever Fat Marmot Week, a contest inspired by the beloved Fat Bear Week, where Alaskan brown bears compete for votes on who's plumped up best for winter.
But it's not all fun and games. The event has a serious purpose: raising money for long-running research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, which has been studying these rodents since 1962 despite federal funding cuts. The lab has lost one-third of its graduate students due to budget constraints, and researchers are getting creative to keep the work alive.
For the uninitiated, a marmot is a cat-sized, furry ground squirrel living in burrows across North America, Europe, and Asia. The 15 or so species include groundhogs, who already have their own day (Groundhog Day, February 2, in case you've been living under a rock - or a burrow). In the Rockies, yellow-bellied marmots are plentiful and charismatic, often spotted perching on boulders or scurrying through wildflowers. They exhibit distinct personalities and are "flexibly social," meaning some prefer mingling in colonies of up to 30, while others are lone wolves (or lone marmots).
"We kind of understand these marmots just by looking at them sometimes," said Katie Adler, a doctoral student at UCLA. Some are wary of researchers' traps baited with oats and peanut butter, while others "you could trap three or four times in the same morning," added Emily Renkey, a UCLA master's student.
Marmots take hibernation to an extreme. Unlike bears, which enter a lighter torpor and can wake occasionally, marmots drop their body temperature to as low as 41°F (5°C), barely above their burrow's winter chill. "You pick up a hibernated marmot and it's this fuzzy ball and it feels like a cold rock with fur," said Dan Blumstein, a UCLA professor. "They breathe once a minute or two." To prepare, they double their weight to up to 13 pounds (6 kg), then lose it all during six months or more of hibernation.
Last winter's scant snowfall and warm temperatures - thanks to global warming - deprived many Colorado marmots of their insulating snow blanket. "We had over 160 animals and we ended with 60 at the start of this season," Blumstein said. "Most of them died because of the lack of snow cover." The snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin (Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico) was the worst on record, and a new study confirms the human-caused climate crisis made the snow drought about 14 times more likely.
The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory has observed other changes too: fewer bees and pollinators, and sagebrush encroaching on wildflower valleys. But the marmot researchers - who affectionately call themselves "marmoteers" - are pressing on. The study, run by UCLA at the center about 20 miles south of Aspen, is one of the world's longest-running studies of individual mammals.
Fat Marmot Week is one way to attract attention and donations. Among the contestants: Stonehenge, who chirps at mountain bikers, and Citroen, whose mate leads this matriarchal marmot motherland. Voting opens Monday. And if that's not enough, researchers have also been posting marmot videos on OnlyFans, and one "super fan" created a meme coin. Because nothing says "save the marmots" like crypto and adult content platforms.