Naked mole rat Burrow, Incisor, Facts, & Description

hair mole rat

Damaraland mole rats are found from western Zambia to northwestern South Africa. The average lifespan for a queen is between 13 and 18 years and the actual queen of a cluster can act very hostile towards another female that acts like a queen. Due to long periods of hunger experienced by this underground rodent, it has adapted to have a low respiratory and metabolic rate for an animal of its size. The metabolism of the Naked Mole-Rat can be reduced by as much as 25-percent when necessary without causing any hardship to the rodent. This is the same percentage humans have in each leg to put it in perspective. The Naked Mole-Rat (Heteroephalus glaber) also known as the Sand Puppy, is a rodent that typically burrows.

Colony Behavior

These groups are thought to be extended families comprising several generations. Reproduction is limited to the largest female and to one or two large males. Individuals from the same system live peacefully together but are extremely aggressive toward individuals originating in other colonies. It is also remarkable for its longevity and its resistance to cancer and oxygen deprivation. Only one female in a colony of naked mole-rats produces offspring; this female is called the queen. She mates with only a few of the colony's males, and these relationships can remain stable for many years.

Meet the naked mole-rat: impervious to pain and cancer, and lives ten times longer than it should

It’s possible for the skin around the mole to be slightly more sensitive which could lead to some discomfort after using certain methods. Occasionally, shaving and chemical hair removal products can cause scabbing over the mole, which, while it doesn’t inherently pose health risks, would make it harder to inspect the mole to see if it’s cancerous. It’s also a good idea when using depilatory chemicals to follow the instructions carefully and test out the product on a small patch of skin before using it on larger areas in case of allergies or irritation. If you want to avoid the risk of an angry mole altogether, you might choose less irritating ways of getting rid of the hair such as tweezing or trimming with a device such as a nose or ear hair trimmer. (Perhaps even too radically different.) Mole rat researchers haven’t yet managed to harness these shrively fountains of youth.

hair mole rat

Resistance to cancer

Since they fend off disease so well, she expected to find a festival of natural killer cells—the quick-moving hit squad that zaps cancerous cells and pathogens in humans before they can turn into bigger problems. “We couldn't find natural killer cells at all.” More lethal T cells may pick up the slack, Buffenstein says. They’ve also got a much higher proportion of macrophages and neutrophils—the invader-eating white blood cells that turn into pus. That front line is “ready to pounce on anything that's foreign and destroy it almost instantly,” Buffenstein says.

“They’re lovely, lovely animals,” Melissa Holmes says with great sincerity. Holmes is a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Toronto who works with more than 1,000 naked mole rats. The inner workings of mole rats’ odd eusocial structure earns them a reputation for aggression. “But for animals that live in such large groups, they are remarkably stable,” she says.

hair mole rat

The larger workers are constantly on the lookout as they are the ones who defend the colony in case of attack. A colony has a single female queen with no more than three male breeders. The breeding males and a queen can form a partnership that can last for many years, while other females are sterile. What’s even more striking is that the burrowing rodents seem to age without any clear signs of degeneration and age-related health issues.

Meet the naked mole-rat: impervious to pain and cancer, and lives ten times longer than it should - The Conversation

Meet the naked mole-rat: impervious to pain and cancer, and lives ten times longer than it should.

Posted: Mon, 17 Jun 2019 07:00:00 GMT [source]

Top 20 Unusual Animal Facts

They often raid the tuber crops of native people and become pests in vegetable and flower gardens by destroying bulbs. These mole rats exhibit co-operative breeding, where some individuals forgo reproduction to help others breed. Although this type of reproduction is most common among insects like honeybees, two species of African mole rat (naked and Damaraland mole rats) display this behavior as well. Originally, its occurrence in mole rats was thought to stem from inbreeding. However, scientists used genetic markers to show that Damaraland mole rats are not inbred. Damaraland mole rats are active throughout the day and night; activity alternates with about five major rest periods during a 24-hour period.

Living in an oxygen-poor environment means naked mole-rats breathe a large amount of carbon dioxide, which can cause excessive amounts of acid to build up internally. This would be a huge problem for most animals, but naked mole-rats do not feel pain. Not only that, but they have also evolved the ability to lower their own heart rate, allowing them to survive several hours with low oxygen or even live for up to 18 minutes with zero oxygen with no adverse effects. Naked mole-rats also have a high resistance to tumors and cancer. The naked mole-rat is perhaps one of the most bizarre beasts on the planet.

Naked mole rats are nearly deaf because their ears can't amplify sound - New Scientist

Naked mole rats are nearly deaf because their ears can't amplify sound.

Posted: Thu, 03 Sep 2020 07:00:00 GMT [source]

At birth, a mole-rat pup weighs less than a penny!

Their oxygen use is so efficient that they can function for up to five hours without any oxygen whatsoever. Instead, when oxygen is low or non-existent, the mammals use fructose to power energy production in their cells. Naked mole rats are native to East Africa, where they live underground inside very complex networks of tunnels.

After each helpless pup is born, it is cleaned and carried to the nursery by a worker. Within a few weeks, the pups start to explore the tunnels, and in a few months they take their place as part of the workforce. While mice and rats live for a maximum of four to five years, some naked mole rats are over 30 years old and going strong.

Last year, Buffenstein reported that they show 10 times more of it in their connective tissue than in humans and mice—and it’s more stable. So mole rats are unquestionably weird, and that might well be useful, but they might also turn out to be too weird. Their isolated, predator-free, underground existence, says Rich Miller, a University of Michigan biogerontologist, might be too unique to translate. "They are so weird and, in many ways, so different from the other kinds of slow-aging mammals," he says. For example, levels of one particular antioxidant called thioredoxin reductase 2 are elevated among the long-lived rodents, primates, and birds Miller has studied.

Several feet below the surface, the temperature never goes up or down, which is why they don’t really need any hair. All they have are some facial whiskers and a few specialized body hairs that help the mole-rats navigate their surroundings. A 2018 study published in eLife found that, unlike other mammals, naked mole-rats' risk of mortality doesn't increase as they age.

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