Fat Marmot Week Is Coming — and Yes, You Get to Vote
Fat Bear Week has some serious competition.
The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory Marmot Project is launching the first-ever Fat Marmot Week, a bracket-style public voting competition to crown the fattest, most hibernation-ready yellow-bellied marmot of the season. Voting opens August 24, the final round goes down August 28, and the winner gets crowned August 29.
You can cast your votes and support the Marmot project here.
The competition mirrors Fat Bear Week — the beloved annual Katmai National Park tradition where the public votes on which brown bear has packed on the most mass before winter. Same concept, much smaller and fluffier contestants.
Dan Blumstein, UCLA professor and co-director of the lab, wants you to know something important though. Bears don't actually hibernate. Marmots do. And marmots are, by his account, the biggest true hibernators out there — animals that can double or even triple their body mass in preparation for roughly five months underground, then somehow emerge in spring without any of the metabolic damage that kind of weight gain would cause in most mammals. They get obese on purpose and it doesn't hurt them. Scientists are genuinely fascinated by how they pull that off.
Meet the Contestants
A few marmots have already been introduced on the competition's Instagram. Dans_hat — known as the "cool aunt" — is in the running. So is Citroën, described as "the stepdad," and Open Kite, apparently a "girl boss." More contestants will be announced as the event gets closer.
The lab team captured most of the competing marmots, gave them tiny earrings to tell them apart, and painted marks on their backs so researchers can identify them from a distance. It sounds elaborate, but when you're studying individually marked wild mammals over decades, you need a system.
One marmot apparently figured out how to flip the traps over, steal the bait inside, and escape without getting caught. Her kids watched and learned to do the same thing. She was presumably disqualified from competition on the grounds of being too clever for a straightforward weigh-in.
Why This Exists
The honest answer is: funding cuts.
Blumstein needed money to support his graduate students after research funding tightened. His solution has been unconventional to say the least — the same lab that runs Fat Marmot Week also operates OnlyMarms, a PG-rated OnlyFans account used to raise money for marmot research that went surprisingly viral earlier this year.
"We're not influencers. We're not getting major sponsorships, and I don't care about merch — I care about money to support grad students," Blumstein said. "So it's like, how do we monetize this stuff?"
Fat Marmot Week is the answer they landed on. The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory has been running one of the world's longest continuous studies of individually marked wild mammals. Long-term wildlife research takes years to produce results and is notoriously difficult to fund — which is why a bracket competition about chunky marmots competing for a hibernation crown is, in a roundabout way, genuinely important to science.
Why Marmots Are Actually Worth Studying
Beyond the entertainment value of watching round little mammals compete for the title of Fattest Boy, yellow-bellied marmots offer researchers something genuinely valuable — a living model for understanding how mammals manage extreme metabolic changes without the health consequences those changes would cause in humans.
A person gaining that much body weight that quickly would face serious cardiovascular and metabolic consequences. Marmots don't. Understanding why — how their bodies regulate insulin, inflammation, and fat storage during hibernation preparation and then reverse everything cleanly in spring — has real implications for research into obesity, diabetes, and metabolic disease in humans.
They're also highly social animals, which makes them useful for studying how group dynamics, stress, and social relationships affect long-term health and survival — questions that apply well beyond marmots.
So vote for your favorite chubby marmot. You're supporting science.
Follow along at @rocky_mountain_bio_lab and @rmblmarmotproject on Instagram.
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