Why is this animal unusual?
Naked mole-rats live like bees. One queen has all the babies, a few males are her partners and everyone else – sometimes up to 300 animals – works as a digger, nanny or soldier. Only one other mammal on Earth is known to live this way.
Why does it look like that?
That body is built for tunnels. No fur, because it’s always warm underground. Tiny eyes, because there is nothing to see. Loose wrinkly skin for squeezing past colleagues. And huge front teeth that sit outside the lips, so it can dig without swallowing dirt.
Strangest biological feature
It can survive without oxygen. When the air runs out, a naked mole-rat switches its body to burning fructose – a trick normally used by plants. In experiments it lasted 18 minutes with no oxygen at all and recovered without any damage.
Why is it strange?
It doesn’t seem to age like the rest of us. A 25-year-old naked mole-rat is about as likely to die as a 5-year-old one. It almost never develops cancer, and its skin doesn’t feel the burn of acid or chili peppers.
Interesting behavioral facts
The queen keeps her throne by shoving and bullying, which stops other females from breeding. Workers dig in chain gangs, passing soil backwards like a conveyor belt. And every colony has its own dialect of chirps, which the pups learn as they grow up.
Records held
It’s the longest-living rodent on record, with individuals passing 37 years. It’s also the closest thing to a cold-blooded mammal: its body temperature simply drifts up and down with the tunnel around it.
