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 the 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.”

Dawn, the inaugural winner of Fat Marmot Week, is a father who enjoys the taste of rocks.

Daniel Blumstein

hide caption

toggle caption

Daniel Blumstein

The Marmot Project also announced the 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.

Stonehenge the marmot stands regal in a field.

Daniel Blumenstein

hide caption

toggle caption

Daniel Blumenstein

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.