The naked mole-rat barely ages, resists cancer, and runs cold
A wrinkled rodent that lives like an insect and defies the biology of small mammals.
By the usual rules, a rodent the size of the naked mole-rat should live two or three years. Instead it can survive around 30 years, far longer than any other rodent — and it does so almost without showing the cancers and frailty that age most mammals. Autopsy studies of zoo and lab animals have struggled to find a single tumour.
It is also biologically bizarre in other ways. The naked mole-rat is widely described as the only known eusocial mammal, living in colonies of up to 300 animals ruled by a single breeding queen, much like a bee or ant nest.
It is essentially cold-blooded, the rare mammal that lets its body temperature track its surroundings rather than holding it steady.
Living packed underground in stale, high-carbon-dioxide air, it has even lost sensitivity to certain kinds of pain — making it a favourite subject for researchers studying ageing and cancer.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
