The naked mole rat, Heterocephalus glaber, is fleshy, furless, buck-toothed and brazenly ugly. Yet what these small East African rodents lack in terms of good looks, they make up with an impressive array of biological quirks.
They live in underground cooperative colonies of up to 300 individuals with a dominant breeding “queen” and celibate soldier and worker castes.
The social structure of a naked mole rat colony mirrors that of a beehive or ant nest, with a single breeding female at its head. When an old queen dies, the female soldiers engage in blind battle. After much head-butting and clambering, a single victor becomes the new queen and the most powerful males become her royal consorts.
Then the young queen grows noticeably larger and longer than her workers, as the vertebrae in her spine spread to accommodate an almost continuous state of pregnancy.
The high ambient carbon dioxide concentration increases acid in the rodents’ tissue fluid to levels that would leave most mammals writhing in agony. Researchers discovered that a mutation in a single gene has switched off this response in mole rats, allowing them to adapt to what would otherwise be an extremely uncomfortable environment – and incidentally, giving them a superhero-like resistance to pain.
Oh, yeah – the naked mole rat also lives about 30 years (about ten times the lifespan of most other rodents) and is immune to cancer.
Via Damn Interesting.
I wonder if perhaps these were the predominent type of mammals prior to the astroid that killed the dinosaurs as there was more carbon-dioxide then.It could have been a mutation of coming out of the ground to live.
That’s a really interesting idea. I tried to dig up more info on their evolutionary path, but unfortunately the Internet failed me.
But even without the carbon dioxide aspect, just the degree to which they exist completely underground would be enough to give them a definite leg up after the Chicxulub impact.