Annnnd there's a winner in the first-ever Fat Marmot Week!
The competition was among eight yellow-bellied marmots in Colorado vying to gain the most weight before winter hibernation. The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory's Marmot Project hosted Fat Marmot Week as a way to hype up these cat-sized alpine rodents, in the face of cuts to research funding.
Yellow-bellied marmots hibernate to survive the snowy high-mountain winters. They curl up, lower their body temperatures, and slow their breathing. They spend more than half the year like this, relying on their stored fat. Thus: Fat Marmot Week.
Marmot enthusiasts were encouraged to cheer on Dawn, G, Dan's Hat, Citroen, Open Kite, 1, Dandelion, and Stonehenge as they spent the month of August bulking up.
Weekend Edition had the honor of exclusively announcing the popular vote winner — the marmot that the public crowned as the fattest of them all.
Congratulations to Dawn! Your chunky champion is a father who the RMBL says "emjoys the taste of rocks."
The Marmot Project also announced that Dawn was the competition's "true" winner on Saturday, based on researchers' estimation of the animals' actual size. Clocking in with a 4.5lb weight gain for a total of 13lbs, congratulations to Dawn for gaining the most weight!
Weekend Edition staff also held an informal vote, picking Stonehenge, a resilient mother who lost her litter to a hungry badger earlier this year.
The competition was inspired by Alaska's Fat Bear Week — when more than a million people cast votes for the chonkiest brown bear.
Fun fact: Marmots are the biggest true hibernators in the world. Bears do not hibernate, they go into a sort of deep sleep called "torpor."
The Marmot Project has been researching these rodents since 1962. It's one of the longest-running projects studying individually tagged mammals in the wild.
"These long-term studies provide us the insights to understand how organisms, plants, animals, whatever, respond to a changing environment," said Dan Blumstein, a professor at UCLA who runs the Marmot Project, in an interview with NPR's Ayesha Rascoe earlier this month.
Fat Marmot Week is not the only way that the project is creatively working to restore lost funds.
Blumstein opened an OnlyFans account, OnlyMarms, promising "uncensored marmot content" to subscribers.
At the beginning of August, OnlyMarms had generated about $4,000 for research funding. Blumstein hopes the hoopla around Fat Marmot Week will boost donations.
"We have some funding for next year, but after that, it's looking very dire," Blumstein said.
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