You know naked mole rats? These guys:
img
We'll be doing the accepted science thing of abbreviating them to NMRs.
They're messed up on many fronts...
Their front teeth are outside of their lips.
They live underground and never really come to the surface.
They maintain such specific temperatures within their tunnels, they can't really regulate their own body temperature very well.
They have reduced hyperalgesia -- that's when sensations of pain and heat become increased at an injury site. Likely because living in a crowded tunnel would make increased pain and heat sensations Hell.
They are basically immune to cancer (highly resistant). This one is HUGE because figuring out how They do it can help us know how We might also do it1. It also means that NMRs live way longer than other rodents.
They're eusocial. For the unfamiliar, "eusocial" is the word used to describe the kind of social structure that honeybees and many ants have: one queen, who reproduces, and a bunch of non-reproductive guys who help the queen out. This is wild to me, mostly because bees/ants/wasps tend to do this due to haplodiploidy (probably) which i am not going to try to explain, here's wikipedia link if you like inheritance patterns and sex determination biology. NMRs don't have haplodiploidy, theyre doing this for Some Other Reason. The guess is living in a very harsh environment, last I heard.
this also means:
Naked Mole Rat Queen. And yes, she's anatomically different than an average NMR. Cause the tunnels they live in are narrow, she can't exactly get Bigger per se, so instead she just gets longer to accomodate more babies2. And sometimes there are conflicts in which a female NMR kills the others to become the queen.
...the colony's workers also eat the queen's shit, literally.
^ I think thats the queen with nasty lil larvae babies climbing on her
also
img . This is from source 2, recommend browsing that cause the image cuts off :[
not talking towards a Conclusion nor a Point other than these guys have SO much going on. Absolutely got some special sauce. Special sauce which may include some "very inbred" .
much to this point: when thinking (fondly, of course) about the humble Naked Mole Rat, always remember that a very early description of them assumed that the one they found was very diseased because it was so weird (it was a healthy NMR, for the record).
- Shepard, A., and Kissil, J. L. (2020) The use of non-traditional models in the study of cancer resistance—the case of the naked mole rat. Oncogene 39:5083–5097
- Dengler-Crish, D. M. (2007). Growing out of a caste - Reproduction and the making of the queen mole-rat. Journal of Experimental Biology 210(2):261-8
