High in the Colorado mountains, marmots are fattening up for winter — and researchers are inviting the public to cheer them on for a cause. The first-ever Fat Marmot Week begins Monday, an online voting contest modeled on Fat Bear Week, the popular bracket celebrating Alaskan brown bears at their plumpest each fall at Katmai National Park, where the animals bulk up on salmon ahead of their own hibernation and online voters pick a champion. But behind the fun lies an urgent goal: scientists need to drum up donations to keep their long-running research on the rodents alive through federal funding cuts.

The launch follows a brutal winter. Researchers say two-thirds of one marmot population died while hibernating because of insufficient snow cover. The survivors are doing well, fattening up not just for fall and hibernation season but — drumroll, please — for the contest itself.

“In some sense, we’re going to be laughing our way down as the Titanic sinks,” said Dan Blumstein, leader of the project launched decades ago at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado — a high-altitude field station founded in 1928 in a former mining town. “Because what else are you going to do?”

A marmot is a cat-sized, furry ground squirrel that lives in burrows across North America, Europe and Asia. Of the roughly 15 species worldwide, the most famous may be the groundhog, which has its own special day each Feb. 2 in the U.S. and Canada.

In the Rocky Mountains, yellow-bellied marmots are plentiful. Hikers often spot the charismatic creatures perched on boulders or scurrying through wildflowers, and the animals are not shy near trails popular with people — a bold one might swipe your snack.

Like people, marmots have personalities and are “flexibly social,” meaning some intermingle in colonies of up to 30 animals while others prefer solitude, according to Emily Renkey, a master’s program student at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“We kind of understand these marmots just by looking at them sometimes, because we can kind of tell who’s who just by how they behave and how they interact with one another,” said Katie Adler, a UCLA doctoral student.

Fieldwork has its challenges. Some marmots are wary of researchers’ efforts to trap them in wire boxes baited with an enticing mixture of oats and peanut butter, Renkey said. “Others, you could trap three or four times in the same morning,” she said.

While hibernating bears snooze in a lighter state called torpor, waking — or being woken — every now and then, marmots slip into a far deeper hibernation. Their body temperature drops from about that of a human to as low as 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius), not much warmer than their burrows in winter.

“You pick up a hibernating marmot and it’s this fuzzy ball and it feels like a cold rock with fur. It’s completely surreal,” Blumstein said. “They breathe once a minute or two.”

To prepare for winter, the animals fatten tremendously, doubling their weight to as much as 13 pounds (6 kilograms), then losing all of that bulk during half a year or more of hibernation. “Marmots come out of the ground really skinny, relative to what they look like now, at least,” Adler said.

Last winter, scant snowfall and warm temperatures driven by global warming deprived many Colorado marmots of an insulating blanket of snow over their burrows. Researchers believe their hibernation quarters became too chilly, and many died of cold.

“We had over 160 animals and we ended with 60 at the start of this season,” Blumstein said. “Most of them died because of the lack of snow cover.”

This year’s snowpack was the worst on record in the Upper Colorado River Basin, which includes Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. Human-caused climate change made the snow drought about 14 times more likely, a new study confirms.

Hundreds of researchers at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, which draws scientists from universities around the world for each short mountain summer, have observed other changes, including fewer bees and other pollinators, and sagebrush encroaching in valleys once dominated by wildflowers. Precipitation changes, meanwhile, cascade downstream to where farmers and communities need water to survive.

“The snowmelt here impacts the Colorado River which impacts our drinking water,” Renkey said. “What happens in these mountains doesn’t stay in these mountains. It impacts all of us.”

The study in Gothic, about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Aspen, is run by researchers from UCLA and the University of Ottawa in Ontario. Launched in 1962, it is one of the world’s longest-running studies of individual mammals, and its researchers affectionately call themselves “marmoteers.” Because generations of individually marked marmots have been weighed and watched year after year, the project has built one of the most complete long-term datasets on a wild mammal — the basis for published research linking the timing of snowmelt to the animals’ weight, reproduction and survival.

“It allows graduate students and other people to come in and suddenly capitalize on this knowledge and ask questions. Without doing all the grunt work,” Blumstein said.

Funding cuts have already caused Blumstein’s UCLA department to lose one-third of its graduate students, part of a broader pullback in federal research support that has squeezed university science programs and pushed more scientists to look for money in unconventional places. Fat Marmot Week is one approach to attract interest — and, hopefully, donations — to keep the work going. Among the rodents on display: Stonehenge, who chirps at mountain bikers; and Citroen, whose mate is a leader of this matriarchal marmot motherland. Voting opens Monday.

The researchers have also been posting marmot videos to OnlyFans, the adult content platform. To capitalize on the attention those posts have garnered, a “super fan” created a meme coin, a type of cryptocurrency, called $OnlyMarms, and donates transaction fees to the research program. That effort alone has raised around $100,000.

The team needs to bank three years of funding — over $200,000 — to ensure the marmot research can continue next summer.

“People have to find funding in ways that we’ve never really thought of before,” Adler said. “Like reaching out to the broader community to get people engaged.”

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.