The numbers come first: 160 animals entering last winter, 60 surviving to spring. That is the stark ledger facing the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, where researchers have tracked yellow-bellied marmots since 1962 — one of the world's longest-running studies of individual mammals.
The die-off, researchers say, was driven by record-low snowpack across the Upper Colorado River Basin, which covers Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. Without an insulating blanket of snow, hibernating burrows grew too cold for animals whose body temperature drops to as low as 41 degrees Fahrenheit during winter sleep. 'We had over 160 animals and we ended with 60 at the start of this season,' said Blumstein, the project's leader. 'Most of them died because of the lack of snow cover.'
Now the study faces a second front: federal funding cuts have caused Blumstein's UCLA department to lose one-third of its graduate students. To keep the research alive, the team is launching Fat Marmot Week — beginning Monday — an online public-voting contest modeled on Alaska's popular Fat Bear Week, designed to raise donations and public attention.
'In some sense, we're going to be laughing our way down as the Titanic sinks,' Blumstein said. 'Because what else are you going to do?'
The project is run jointly by researchers from UCLA and the University of Ottawa. Graduate students Katie Adler and Emily Renkey, who study the animals' social behavior and individual personalities, are among those working to document a population that has now been halved in a single season.
The marmots themselves — cat-sized, furry ground squirrels that double their weight to as much as 13 pounds before hibernation — are recovering well this summer, fattening on mountain meadows roughly 20 miles south of Aspen. The surviving animals are the data point the team is racing to protect.
What the market for science funding is actually saying
The federal government's retreat from basic field research is a policy choice, not an accident. When Washington pulls back from long-running ecological datasets, the institutional knowledge built over 64 years does not transfer to a spreadsheet — it dissolves. Private donors and university endowments are now being asked to fill a gap that taxpayer money once covered, which is a legitimate reallocation question worth asking openly.
Free-enterprise readers should note the downstream stakes Renkey identified: snowmelt from Gothic feeds the Colorado River, which supplies drinking water and irrigation to millions. The marmot study is not a boutique academic exercise — it is an early-warning system for a water basin that underpins agricultural and municipal economies across the American West. Whether federal agencies, state governments or private philanthropy is the right vehicle for that monitoring is a fair debate. What is not debatable is that the data gap, once opened, will be expensive to close.
