Funding losses pushed a 64-year marmot study onto OnlyFans

Blumstein said long-term studies are the only route to watching evolution in action and to understanding plasticity. He called plasticity one of the most important things to study in an era of major environmental change ^[9]. The specific results follow from the span. Winter and summer survival respond to different factors, and those factors act differently on animals of different ages and sexes ^[10]. Marmots do not physiologically age while they hibernate ^[11]. Some individuals live alone while others live in large, multigenerational, female-dominated groups called matrilines, so one population supplies the contrast needed to test what social living does to fitness ^[12].

That contrast is what makes the site useful for an argument still under dispute. Blumstein said the marmots provide some of the best support in the wild for multilevel selection. Under that idea, an individual's position in a social group has consequences for survival and reproduction, and so does the structure of the entire group ^[13]. One finding came from a single animal. "It was a marmot pup screaming in my hands as I held it gently that took me down a path to understand the sound of fear in animals," he said ^[15].

The account came out of fieldwork downtime. "I spend a lot of time in meadows waiting for marmots to do things, and it's a good place to think," Blumstein said ^[14]. He was mulling the study's funding problems, and had recently watched the Apple TV show Margo's Got Money Troubles, about a single mom who resorts to OnlyFans to support her family ^[16].

The money framing comes from the Q&A itself. It says the study is as expensive to run as it is valuable, and that funding challenges forced Blumstein to innovate in new and surprising ways ^[4]. It also says funding losses are putting the study at risk ^[5]. The Q&A does not include the study's budget, a named funder, or what OnlyMarms has earned ^[17]. So the question an outside funder would ask, whether subscription income can substitute for a lapsed grant at the scale of a field season, is not settled by this record.

One co-director improvising does not measure how long-term field ecology is financed. The case does establish the size of the asset in play. Blumstein said students can enter a study like this one and immediately have years of data to work with, or years of insights that let them design focused new experiments ^[18].