A 60-year research project studying marmots in the Rocky Mountains was staring down its own extinction this summer, killed not by predators or habitat loss but by federal budget cuts. Then it got saved by, of all things, OnlyFans and a meme coin.
The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory’s yellow-bellied marmot study, running continuously since 1962, lost its funding when the Trump administration slashed National Science Foundation grants and fired the NSF’s entire independent oversight board, redirecting national research priorities toward AI and robotics and away from wildlife biology entirely. Facing termination, researchers Daniel Blumstein and Julien Martin did something no one would have predicted for one of the longest-running animal monitoring programs on Earth: they put the marmots on OnlyFans. The account, aptly named OnlyMarms, posts exactly what you’d expect from a wildlife study and nothing you’d expect from the platform. It’s all marmots scurrying over rocks, ducking into burrows, and doing marmot things. “Our goal isn’t really to sexualise the marmots,” Blumstein said. “It’s to celebrate the marmots.”
The subscription page alone raised a respectable but modest $6,000. What actually rescued the study was stranger: an anonymous online community built a marmot-themed meme coin called $OnlyMarms on the Solana blockchain, donating all transaction fees back to the research. Martin initially assumed it was a scam. Instead, it raised more than $88,000 in two weeks, pushing the project’s total past $100,000, which was more than enough to fund another full year of research. “I’m completely amazed that this internet culture that I barely know of has raised so much money,” Martin said. “It’s fascinating and shocking to me.” He didn’t miss the irony either, noting it was strange to lean on cryptocurrency (a space that’s personally netted Trump roughly $635 million through his own memecoin) to patch a hole Trump’s own administration tore in science funding.
The stakes here aren’t sentimental. The marmots are documenting real climate impact in real time: researchers have watched the animals grow heavier as summers lengthen and winters shrink, and this past winter’s record-thin snowpack triggered a die-off larger than anything the study has recorded before. Continued funding means continued data on exactly how a warming world is reshaping one Colorado ecosystem, generation by generation, marmot by marmot.
If a wholesome, non-explicit marmot account and a joke cryptocurrency can save 60 years of climate-relevant research, it raises an obvious question about a much bigger and more deliberate experiment already underway: Headline Newds, a new series pairing OnlyFans creators with climate science communication. The most prominent name attached is Lily Phillips, the OnlyFans star with more than two million followers, who’s using her platform to talk wet-bulb temperatures and carbon footprints instead of the extreme publicity stunts she’s previously been known for. The project is backed by “Anchorman” director and longtime climate campaigner Adam McKay and co-founded by filmmaker and adult-content creator Jessica Riches, whose thesis is straightforward: climate messaging has spent decades being technically accurate and emotionally unpersuasive, stereotyped as the domain of “granola” types, while an audience that already knows how to stop someone from scrolling has been sitting untapped the whole time. “Sex sells,” Riches says. “That’s kind of how capitalism operates.”
The marmots offer something close to proof of concept, even if the mechanisms don’t map perfectly. Where OnlyMarms worked by novelty and viral internet weirdness, Headline Newds is betting on borrowed attention by using creators’ existing audiences as a distribution channel for information those audiences wouldn’t otherwise seek out. Both bets share the same underlying logic: institutional funding and traditional messaging have failed to make people care fast enough, so borrow whatever mechanism actually holds attention in 2026 and route it toward the goal anyway. Martin himself said it best about his own unlikely windfall: “it worked for us because we were the first.” Whether Headline Newds can pull off the same trick with a much more self-aware, calculated pitch is the real experiment now running.
Either way, the marmots bought themselves another year, funded by a mechanism nobody would have predicted a decade ago. So if the platform everyone loves to stigmatize turns out to be one of the few things left that can actually make people pay attention to a warming planet, does it matter how the messenger looks?