Gothic, Colorado – Marmots are having a moment. Marmot researchers – AKA marmoteers – Katie Adler and Emily Renkey gave TAG24 NEWS the inside scoop on the first-ever Fat Marmot Week and shared some insights into these fascinating animals.
Researchers Katie Adler and Emily Renkey hope the inaugural Fat Marmot Week will decrease the number of confused looks they get.
"Oftentimes, before, when I would say that I study marmots, you would get kind of like a blank," Emily, a UCLA master's student who is in her fourth season at Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL), told TAG24.
Luckily for these marmoteers, those blank stares may be a thing of the past.
"There's been a lot of chatter about marmots, which is awesome," Emily said.
Marmots are in the spotlight thanks to the creative ideas and hard work coming out of The Marmot Project at RMBL, where these two grad students work.
With funding for federal and institutional projects becoming scarce, researchers at the Marmot Project, the second-longest-running study of its kind that started in 1962, got creative. The RMBL team created OnlyMarms and the first-ever Fat Marmot Week.
What's a marmot?
Not in the know? Marmots are the largest members of the squirrel family, per the Fat Marmot Week website.
Fun fact: these critters are in the same genus as a groundhog: Marmota. "So a marmot, a yellow valley marmot, is not a groundhog, but a groundhog is a marmot," Katie Adler, a UCLA PHD student who's in charge of the field team, said.
If that's too much of a brain twister, just know that these round, cat-sized rodents are the largest true hibernators. They munch on wildflowers and live in colonies.
Marmots have personalities and complex social systems. Colloquially, a group of marmots is called a madness!
Marmots sleep for about seven months of the year, and to survive in burrows under Colorado's snow, they've got to pack the pounds during the summer. Researchers sometimes describe them as "obese cats," because they get so massive that they look like big furry blobs, and their beautiful rolls take the shape of whatever they're lying on.
All this and more makes marmots the perfect animal for an internet campaign based on judging their gains.
Cue Fat Marmot Week, a bracket-style contest in which the public will vote for the marmot they think has gotten the most massive this summer. Voting officially kicks off August 24, but the contestants are already being introduced on the official website and the lab's social media.
Think of Fat Marmot Week as a celebration of animal body positivity, how different scientists do scientific research, and the fact that these critters are real characters.
"I think at the heart of it, it's science communication. [...] At least my goal with anything that I do is getting people excited about it and with this project, we just really want people to get excited about marmots…Getting people interested in science or like wildlife in general is a super valuable thing…the more you learn, the more capacity you have for science and for getting involved in things."
Knowing what marmots are is the baseline goal, and everything else is gravy.
"You can poke a sleeping marmot"
Marmots are the world's largest true hibernators, which, for us non-biologists, means they go into a much deeper sleep than the animal everyone associates with hibernation
"There's a misconception that bears are actually true hibernators," Katie explained. "[Bears] don't quite hibernate."
"They can get up and move around while they're in their hibernation sleep state. They nurse their cubs [...] so they can't actively be fully asleep during that period."
"Whereas marmots enter this state called torpor," she continued, "which is basically like their body slows down to the point where they're non-functioning."
"It's like, don't poke a sleeping bear – but you can poke a sleeping marmot!"
Marmot babies have less time to pack on the pounds and need to gain proportionally more to survive their long winter sleep.
"Most marmots don't actually make it past the age of one. We have 50% pup mortality," Katie explained, emphasizing that it's sadly normal.
"The more time you eat, the less time you have to look for things that might eat you, which is why a lot of them don't make it," Emily said.
Foxes, coyotes, and badgers all eat marmots.
This summer, researchers are optimistic: "We've got a lot of pups right now, and they're looking really fat this summer," Emily said, grinning.
"Being a marmot is hard. Moral of the story," Katie said.
Fat Marmot Week 2026: The willing participants
Excitingly – and unlike the famous Fat Bear Week – there will be a "real" winner in addition to the public's crowned contestant.
"For Fat Marmot Week, we're gonna have a popular vote, and then we're gonna have an actual winner," Emily said.
The marmot that has actually – factually and measurably – gained the most weight over the course of the summer will be announced after the public’s choice is tallied.
Per Emily and Katie, researchers are doing all they can to trap and weigh the yellow-bellied contestants to determine which marmot is the most massive of them all, but as their head researcher, Dan Blumestein, likes to say, those competing marmots are "willing participants."
The researchers didn't want to tell TAG24 who they're rooting for – they've got insider info and competing personal favorites.
"My favorite changes every day. You cannot go wrong. Seriously, all of these marmots are massive," Emily exclaimed.
Keep an eye out for TAG24's rotund rodent roundup coming before Fat Marmot Week voting begins on August 24. Until then, take a gander at some of the RMBL's magnificently massive marmots on their social media.