Naked mole rat com

They get all the hydration they need from their plant-based diet! Mole-rats eat the underground parts of plants. They typically only consume part of a root or tuber, leaving enough behind for it to survive and provide another meal. Naked mole-rats are one of the only true eusocial mammals, meaning they live in large colonies with just one breeding female, called the queen. The queen is the only mole-rat to produce offspring, and a single litter averages 12 to 28 pups.

Yes, these odd little creatures with pink, wrinkly skin dig and live in underground burrows the way moles do. Yes, they have skinny, rat-like tails. Why are they "naked"? Native to the desert regions of East Africa, which can be pretty warm during the day, naked mole-rats live underground. If it does get cold at night, the little mammals just huddle together in a mole-rat pile and use each other's body heat to keep warm. And since they spend their lives underground, they don't need hair for sun protection. It's hard to see, but naked mole-rats do have about fine hairs on their body that act like whiskers to help them feel what's around them.

Around the world and across taxa, subterranean mammals show remarkable convergent evolution in morphology e. This is true of sensory systems as well e. The naked mole-rat Heterocephalus glaber displays these typical subterranean features, but also has unusual characteristics even among subterranean mammals.

In the world of animal models, naked mole rats are the supermodels. They rarely get cancer , are resistant to some types of pain, and can survive up to 18 minutes without oxygen. But perhaps their greatest feat, a new paper suggests, is that they don't age. The first study to analyze the life histories of thousands of naked mole rats has found that their risk of death doesn't go up as they grow older, as it does for every other known mammalian species.