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A shallow focus shot of a Yellow-bellied marmot animal on a stone with green plants in the background in John Muir Trail, California
Many people who work in academia have to balance their research with their efforts to drum up funding to cover it. That includes some scientists at UCLA who specialize in the marmots that are the stars of an OnlyFans account they’ve launched to raise money for their scholarly pursuits.
I feel like most people who are familiar with OnlyFans are also aware of the kind of content that serves as the foundation for a platform that primarily caters to creators and consumers who are drawn to the, um, mature photos and videos that can be a very lucrative stream of income for the people who produce them.
Most OnlyFans accounts are devoted to content that firmly falls under the “NSFW” umbrella, but there are plenty that fall on the tamer side of the spectrum.
That includes “OnlyMarms,” the name given to the profile that’s being run by researchers in California who are trying to drum up funds for projects involving the marmots that serve as the main attraction.
Scientists at UCLA launched an OnlyFans account dedicated to the marmots they study
The academic world can be a fairly cutthroat line of work, and most researchers who are affiliated with colleges and universities have to constantly prove their worth to those learning institutions by leveraging their knowledge to land federal grants and contributions from private donors.
According to The New York Times, a team of biologists at UCLA has opted for a unique strategy when it comes to courting benefactors on that second front, one that revolves around posting videos of marmots on Instagram.
The initiative is being spearheaded by Dr. Daniel Blumstein, whose bio states he has “spent over a decade studying the evolution of complex communication and sociality and used the 14 species of marmots (cat-sized sciurid rodents found throughout the northern hemisphere) as a model system.”
Those marmots are primarily ones of the yellow-bellied variety that comprise a community in Colorado that’s monitored by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, which is where Blumstein was observing them earlier this summer when he realized there may be potential to leverage OnlyFans to raise funds for research projects (an idea that came after he watched the Apple TV show Margo’s Got Money Troubles).
That led to the creation of the account known as “OnlyMarms,” which, as the name suggests, only features “G-rated” videos of marmots doing their thing in the wild.
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The account is free to subscribe to, and Blumstein said the marmots have been able to generate around $650 in tips since it launched close to two months ago.
That’s not that impressive when you consider some of the top earners on the platform rake in upwards of $20 million each month, but it’s certainly better than nothing.