40 Fun Facts About Naked Mole-Rat

What do naked mole-rats mainly use to dig their tunnels through hard-packed soil?

Their teeth do the digging, and their lips close behind them so no soil gets into the mouth while they work.

Medical researchers prize naked mole-rats for their remarkable resistance to which disease?

Cancer is so rare in the species that years of watching large colonies found no cases at all. The first two tumours ever recorded were only reported in 2016, in zoo animals.

Unlike nearly every other mammal, naked mole-rats share which trait with lizards and frogs?

Being cold-blooded, in effect: a naked mole-rat's body temperature drifts with its surroundings, so chilly animals huddle in a pile or bask in sun-warmed shallow tunnels.

To get more nutrients out of tough, hard-to-digest meals, naked mole-rats regularly eat what?

Their own poop gets a second trip through the gut so nothing is wasted. Workers also feed it to pups once the queen's milk stops after about a month.

Which Disney Channel cartoon features Rufus, a naked mole-rat who rides in Ron Stoppable's pocket?

Kim Possible takes Rufus along on the teenage hero's missions with her sidekick Ron, and a New York Times review singled the mole-rat out for praise.

Naked mole-rats can scurry through their narrow tunnels just as fast in which unusual direction?

Backwards is as quick as forwards for a naked mole-rat, a useful trick in tunnels only about 4 centimetres across.

Acid and the fiery compound in chilli peppers both fail to make a naked mole-rat feel what?

Pain signals never fire because the nerve fibres in the skin lack a key chemical messenger, which also seems to leave the animals free of itching.

Naked mole-rats have been known to chew their way through which tough building material?

Concrete can give way to their gnawing, yet in the wild they do most of a year's digging just after the rains, when the hard ground softens.

In which part of the world do wild naked mole-rats dig their burrows beneath hot, dry grassland?

East Africa is their only home: wild colonies live under the dry grasslands of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, in burrows whose tunnels can add up to 4 kilometres.

Which predators, able to slip straight into the tunnels, are the main hunters of naked mole-rats?

Snakes such as the rufous beaked snake can follow the animals down their own tunnels, and up to three naked mole-rats have been found in a single stomach.

Naked mole-rats are not truly bald: their bodies carry about 100 fine hairs that work like what?

Whiskers, in effect: the sparse hairs sense touch, letting the animals feel their way along tunnel walls in the dark.

Many people wrongly think naked mole-rats entirely lack which sense, though it still works a little?

Sight is weak but not gone: their tiny eyes can still see a little, although tests in light and dark show the animals behave the same either way.

The naked mole-rat is also known by which cuter nickname, even though the animal is a rodent?

Sand puppy is the affectionate alternative name, though the animal is neither dog nor mole nor rat: it is the only species in its genus, Heterocephalus.

The little mounds of soil kicked out by digging naked mole-rats are nicknamed after which landforms?

Volcanoes of kicked-out earth are the only sign of a colony above ground, and the animals are at their most vulnerable to predators while making them.

When a naked mole-rat queen dies, how is the colony's next queen usually decided?

Females fight for it, sometimes to the death, and the winner is never secure: she must keep seeing off challengers to stay in charge.

What name is given to the biggest, heaviest workers in a naked mole-rat colony?

Soldiers answer an alarm call from the workers and may pile on top of one another to plug the tunnel, so an intruder meets a wall of snapping mouths.

Naked mole-rats never need to dig for water; where does all of their moisture come from?

Their food is juicy enough to supply every drop, a handy trick in semi-arid country where burrowing is the only way the animals find anything to eat.

What do wild naked mole-rats mainly eat, tunnelling long distances underground to find it?

Tubers can weigh a thousand times as much as the animal eating them, and a colony hollows out only the inside so the plant keeps growing and feeds it for months.

Naked mole-rats roll around in which room of the burrow so every colony member smells the same?

The toilet chamber doubles as an identity badge: colony mates recognise one another, and spot intruders from other colonies, by their shared smell.

Despite the name, naked mole-rats are more closely related to which pets than to moles or rats?

Guinea pigs and chinchillas sit closer on the family tree than any true mole or rat, and the naked mole-rat is the only mole-rat with practically no hair.

Which Pigeon picture-book author wrote Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, about a mole-rat named Wilbur?

Mo Willems published the book in 2009; Wilbur upsets his colony by wearing clothes, and the story later became a stage musical and an animated film.

How does the IUCN Red List rate the naked mole-rat, an animal widespread across its dry homeland?

Least Concern is the rating: the animals are numerous and face no major threat, although a life spent underground makes them almost impossible to spot.

Naked mole-rats can live in air that is 80 percent which gas, common in stuffy, crowded burrows?

Carbon dioxide builds up because the tunnels are poorly ventilated, and the animals are so used to stale air that they pick low-oxygen air over normal air when offered both.

Which term do biologists use for naked mole-rat society, with one breeding queen and many workers?

Eusocial was coined in 1966 to describe certain bees, and the naked mole-rat later became the first mammal shown to fit the definition.

Rufus the naked mole-rat is mistaken for a lost alien experiment in a crossover with which series?

Lilo & Stitch: The Series borrowed him for a 2005 episode named after him, in which Jumba takes the hairless pet for one of his own missing creations.

A newly crowned naked mole-rat queen grows longer by widening the gaps between which bones?

Her vertebrae spread apart once she takes the throne, stretching her body so she has room to carry big litters of pups.

Each naked mole-rat colony shares what, which even adopted pups pick up from their new home?

A vocal dialect marks who belongs: soft chirps differ from colony to colony, and the dialect falls apart when the queen is lost until a new one takes over.

Naked mole-rat litters can outnumber the queen's teats, so how do all of the pups get fed?

They take turns nursing from the same teat, which lets a queen with about a dozen teats raise litters of more than two dozen pups.

Some naked mole-rats, called dispersers, are built to leave home; what do they carry for the trip?

Large fat reserves fuel the trek, and dispersers ignore their own queen: they will only mate with strangers, which brings fresh blood into newly founded colonies.

Naked mole-rats outlive every other rodent; which much larger rodent comes second, at 28 years?

Porcupine lifespans top out near 28 years, while a naked mole-rat only about three inches long has lived past 37.

Naked mole-rats break a rule of mammal biology because their risk of dying does not rise with what?

Old age brings no extra danger: the death rate stays flat through adult life, defying the mortality law that fits humans and most other mammals.

When a naked mole-rat scout discovers a new meal, how do its nestmates find the way there?

Following its scent trail does the job: the scout gives a special call on the way home and waves the food around at the nest, then recruits track the odour it left behind.

A gene borrowed from naked mole-rats has been shown to lengthen the lives of which lab animals?

Mice given the gene stayed healthier in later life and their median lifespan rose by roughly 4.4 percent, proof that one of the species' survival tricks can be exported.

Naked mole-rat colonies that invade a neighbouring burrow sometimes do what with its smallest pups?

Kidnap them as workers is the grim answer: stolen pups grow up labouring for the raiders, a habit otherwise known from a few slave-making insects.

The voice of which Simpsons character also performs Rufus, the naked mole-rat in a Disney cartoon?

Bart Simpson and Rufus share Nancy Cartwright, who researched the real animals for the part and voices him in squeaks, grunts and gurgles rather than scripted lines.

The naked mole-rat's only fellow mammal with queen-led colonies is named for which Namibian region?

Damaraland lends its name to the Damaraland mole-rat, a furry cousin whose colonies are built around a single breeding pair.

When oxygen runs out, naked mole-rat cells switch from glucose to burning which other sugar?

Fructose keeps the brain running through the emergency, letting a naked mole-rat survive 18 minutes with no oxygen at all and wake up unharmed.

Naked mole-rat skin is rich in an extra-heavy form of which gooey molecule, sold in face serums?

Hyaluronic acid in naked mole-rats is over five times larger than the human kind, and researchers suspect it evolved to keep skin stretchy for a life of squeezing through tunnels.

After two 2013 discoveries about its cells, the journal Science gave the naked mole-rat which title?

Vertebrate of the Year honoured a run of findings by one university team, including the animal's unusually accurate protein-making machinery.

Hairs between a naked mole-rat's toes let its feet work like which household tools?

Brooms, in effect: the toe hairs sweep loosened soil along the tunnel as a chain of workers passes it towards the surface.