{"id":831005,"date":"2026-08-30T16:18:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T16:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/831005\/"},"modified":"2026-08-30T16:18:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T16:18:15","slug":"exclusive-meet-the-inaugural-winner-of-fat-marmot-week-npr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/831005\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: Meet the inaugural winner of Fat Marmot Week : NPR"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/p>\n

\n The first ever Fat Marmot Week ends on August 30, 2026.<\/p>\n

Eric Philips<\/p>\n

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Eric Philips<\/p>\n

Annnnd there’s a winner in the first-ever Fat Marmot Week!<\/p>\n

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<\/a> as a way to hype up these cat-sized alpine rodents, in the face of cuts to research funding.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Weekend Edition had the honor of exclusively announcing the popular vote winner \u2014 the marmot that the public crowned as the fattest of them all.<\/p>\n

Congratulations to Dawn! Your chunky champion is a father who the RMBL says “emjoys the taste of rocks.”<\/p>\n

\"Dawn,<\/p>\n

\n Dawn, the inaugural winner of Fat Marmot Week, is a father who enjoys the taste of rocks.<\/p>\n

Daniel Blumstein<\/p>\n

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Daniel Blumstein<\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

Weekend Edition staff also held an informal vote, picking Stonehenge, a resilient mother who lost her litter to a hungry badger earlier this year. <\/p>\n

\"Stonehenge<\/p>\n

\n Stonehenge the marmot stands regal in a field.<\/p>\n

Daniel Blumenstein<\/p>\n

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Daniel Blumenstein<\/p>\n

The competition was inspired by Alaska’s Fat Bear Week<\/a> \u2014 when more than a million people cast votes for the chonkiest brown bear.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

Fat Marmot Week is not the only way that the project is creatively working to restore lost funds.<\/p>\n

Blumstein opened an OnlyFans account, OnlyMarms, promising “uncensored marmot content” to subscribers.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“We have some funding for next year, but after that, it’s looking very dire,” Blumstein said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first ever Fat Marmot Week ends on August 30, 2026. Eric Philips hide caption toggle caption Eric…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":831006,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-831005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831005\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/831006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}