The naked mole rat. You would think it is a made up name. But nothing could be further from the truth! And it’s not just the name of this special animal that is strange…
You can only find naked mole rats in the Horn of Africa. And if you saw one bumping across the savannah, you would almost think it was an alien. With their bald and pink skin, long yellow front teeth and tiny beady eyes, these peculiar rodents certainly do not deserve a beauty prize. But they don’t care, because they are as good as blind! They live underground, in tunnels that they dig themselves by chipping away at soil with their long, strong front teeth. Some tunnels run just below the surface, others meters deep underground. So they are difficult to find and have been on my list of animals that I want to film in the wild for years.
Long live the queen
These wrinkly nudists love to socialize and live in enormous colonies of dozens to sometimes hundreds of animals. However, there is only one queen, and her only job is to produce naked mole rat babies. Her subjects take care of the little ones, collect the food, and maintain the tunnel systems. To prevent romantic affairs among the ‘common people’, the queen has come up with something clever. With a substance in her urine, she personally ensures that all her offspring are kept infertile. The queen herself, on the other hand, never stops having babies, unless of course she dies. Then she can no longer keep her subjects infertile and the battle erupts over who will be the new queen. Until her death, the queen’s fertility does not decrease, as it does with us. She can produce eggs throughout her life, meaning that even an elderly mole rat queen can still produce young ones. And since naked mole rats can live for more than 30 years, making them the longest-lived rodents in the world, a queen can have thousands of babies in her lifetime. An almost endless supply of subjects to rule, how convenient is that!
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