Move over fat bears. This summer, there’s a new mammal vying for the title of the most rotund.
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Colorado’s inaugural Fat Marmot Week gives locals the chance to vote for their favorite furry contenders in a competition of outsized proportions. Hosted by the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, the event aims to raise awareness about the yellow-bellied marmot, which gains girth as it grazes in alpine meadows during the summer months.
Marmots are rodents and the largest of Colorado’s ground squirrels. Similar to bears, the animals hibernate throughout the winter, so they spend the time before then eating grasses and wildflowers to pack on the pounds that insulate them in cold temperatures.
Given that shared behavior between the two species, the researchers at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory took a cue from the famous Fat Bear Week — which sees the public vote for their favorite beefy bears at Alaska’s Katmai National Park — and decided to throw a competition of their own.
Voting starts Aug. 24, but from now through Aug. 21, the lab will slowly unveil the contenders on Instagram.
They also recently started an OnlyFans account — something usually reserved for spicier subjects. It’s called OnlyMarms, and people can directly support with subscriptions and gain access to cam footage surveilling marmot dens.
The competition runs as a head-to-head bracket with each day Aug. 24 through Aug. 28 showcasing a new round of matchups. The winner of the people’s choice vote will be crowned on Aug. 29, and that same day, the researchers will also reveal which rodent actually gained the most mass.
The animals featured during Fat Marmot Week come from a colony near the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, which has been studying the animals’ behaviors and survival since 1962 as part of its Marmot Project. Each one is named for the fur marks made by the researchers with a non-toxic dye, which help identify them over the course of the rodents’ lives, according to the website. The first is an adult female named Dan’s Hat.
Adult marmots nearly double in size after summer grazing, from an average of 5 or 6 pounds to 11-plus pounds, said Katie Adler, a Ph.D candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles and one of the Marmot Project researchers. “They’re pretty obese, cat-sized by the end of the season,” she said.
Young pups grow even more compared to the size of their body weight, she said, often starting at less than a pound and reaching 3 pounds or more. “It’s really insane how fast their bodies grow,” Adler said.
Adler and her colleague Emily Renkey, also a UCLA graduate student and researcher with the Marmot Project, believe now is the perfect time to highlight the animals since they survived a particularly harsh winter. Record low snowpack led to the loss of 100 marmots in the area near Crested Butte where the women do their fieldwork.
“We had 160 animals last summer, and then this year about 60 emerged, which is a huge die-off. It’s super sad,” said Renkey. “There was no snow on the ground, which insulates the marmots over the winter from temperature fluctuations in the air. So they were using more of their body fat to try and stay warm.”
Marmots are what’s known as “true hibernators,” meaning they enter a deep slumber when they hibernate and their body temperatures drop to just above freezing to conserve energy, Renkey said. Unlike bears, which periodically awaken to eat and give birth during the winter, marmots remain dormant until the spring.
“During hibernation, you could physically pick marmots up, and they’d be a curled-up fuzzy rock,” Renkey said.
Previously, researchers thought shorter winters could benefit marmots since it would give them more time to get fat before hibernating. This past winter showed that may not be the case, Renkey said. Additionally, the population isn’t bouncing back as quickly as scientists hoped, which is “an indicator that these changes could be more permanent than we previously assumed,” she added.
If nothing else, the team hopes Fat Marmot Week and OnlyMarms will spark curiosity about the animals among Coloradans and help support the research that the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory has been doing for more than 50 years.
Since the media caught wind of OnlyMarms, the account has raised $3,000 Renkey said. “It’s like ‘The Secret Lives of Marmot Wives,’” she said, riffing on the popular reality TV series “Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.”
Fat Marmot Week will soon be underway. Keep up with the latest reveals on Instagram @rmblmarmotproject or at sites.google.com/view/fatmarmotweek/home.
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