Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you should Know, part of our ongoing Amazing Animals edition. Maybe the most robust rhinoceros like suite of all of our sweets.
Probably that are crime and punishment.
Sure, sure, but I think everybody can get behind you know, sloths and elephants and not everybody's like sure.
Prison right or crime scene clean up?
Sure? Well that was a tough one. But today we're adding to the animal one, and we're adding a good one. Chuck. This is a great pick because thank you. We're talking about naked mole rats. And they're one of those things like narwhals where you're like, I've heard of it. I know everybody's into him and everything, But unlike narwals, when you do a little investigating into him, naked mule rats are ridiculously interesting.
They are. And I think I mentioned this on an episode, but where I got this idea it was long simmering because the great Errol Morris documentary Fast, Cheap and out of Control, which have you seen it? No, it's a great documentary. It's been around for a long time. And in that documentary he takes I think three disparate professions gentlemen who performed these professions, and also ties it into an old lion tamer guy from a circus with like
footage and telling his story. There's like a robot scientist, a topiary gardener, the aforementioned lion tamer from footage, and then this guy who is a naked mole rat scientist.
Oh yeah, what's his name?
I don't remember his name. I can picture his face and looking at you know. When that documentary was, it was pretty early on and kind of what we knew about naked mole rat, so he was probably on the leading edge, but.
On the leading edge, not the bleeding edge.
That's when I first sort of discovered the naked mole rat and fell in love with what might be the ugliest animal on earth.
For real, for real. Yeah. I saw somewhere that National Geographic described them as bratwurst with teeth.
Oh Man, and apparently.
The guy who first described him, Edward Repel, back in eighteen forty two. When he described him, other biologists were like, well, clearly, Repel, you're dumb, because this has got to be a baby of some sort of some other species, or these things are diseased. They're not their own thing. And he said, no, really, I think they're their own thing. And he turned out to be right. But that just goes to show just how weird looking they are that even biologists were like, what is this thing?
Yeah, like any naked animal, and there are a handful. Is strange looking to people that are accustomed to mammals with fur. Yeah, I should say mammals, but the naked mole rat is I mean, boy, this thing is like only a mother could love, is the saying. I think a face and body for sure.
They all have the same mother pretty much, I do know.
Look at you.
Yeah, we'll get into that later. But dropping it in, let's talk a little bit about the taxonomic classification of naked mole rats, shall we.
Yeah, uh, take it away, because they used to be classified differently, but they finally settled on giving them their own little space, now right.
I don't know that they settled on it. I think it's proposed, and not everybody in the naked mole rat research community agrees on it. But they are rodents. They're in the order Rodentia. They're in the family bath there, Ergide, I even practiced. That's so frustrating to have practiced it out loud and still miffed it.
No, I think you got it, Beth Ergide.
Yeah, I got it the second time, but it should have rolled off my tongue for as much as I practiced it.
That never does.
So all of the family Bathi Ergiday are are located in Sub Saharan Africa. Yeah, and uh, there's a bunch of different kinds of mole rats. It's just the naked morad is its own thing, and it's so distinct in so many different ways that, like you were saying, some naked morat scientists are like, there, we just need to make their own family because right now they're a separate genus.
They're their own genus heterocephal Heterocephalida practice that one too, But they're so different from the other members of the family that they're like, we should not just classify them as their own genus and species, We should classify them as their own family. This one type of animals should be its own family. Not everybody's on.
Board, Yeah, but I think everyone listening has a family member that you know, they think maybe should be classified as their own family.
Always naked buck teeth. Sure that family member rusty uncle Rusty.
Like you mentioned, the naked mole rats live throughout the Horn of Africa, generally in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia, and they are doing great. There are a lot of them. This isn't one of those I feel like most of the animals we cover have some sort of threatened designation, but they're killing it and they're doing awesome. There's lots of them.
One reason why is because the land that they live under is so arid that it's not usually disturbed for crop land, so they don't get into fights with farmers typically, which would be a big problem for them because they would eat all the farmers' crops and the farmers would kill them all. So because they don't really dwell where humans tend to dwell, that's a big mark in their favor from what I.
Saw, totally they I mean, hopefully you've looked up a picture, like pulled off to the side of the road or something if you're driving, to see a picture of these things, so you have an idea of what we're talking about. If not, do so, because you might think they look like maybe a newborn guinea pig or something. Maybe, I mean that's being kind, I guess, and that's the adults. Yeah, exactly.
But they did diverge from guinea pigs they believe, about fifty million years ago, so they're related in a way, but they, like you said, they really are their own thing.
Yeah, and they're pretty much not related to moles or rats. It's their closest relative as guinea pigs, like you said. And one of the things that really makes naked mole rats special is that they are fossorial, which is a type of animal that lives underground pretty much all the time. They don't live underground and it's hot out and then come out at night to feed or hunt. They live underground.
I'm sure plenty of them spend their entire lives underground, and their lives are significant in length, as we'll see, But that that's a big distinction because there's a lot of animals that live underground but spend time above ground too. Not naked mole rats.
No, they love it down there. And as we've covered in what was the bios Spieliology episode, I think yeah, and we also didn't we also do one on other cave dwelling animals or was that that one? I think it was that one, all right, either one or two of those. But we you know, they have some features that other animals who live generally deep underground for a lot of their lives have, which is not really useless eyes. I mean they have technically they have eyes. They can
sense bright and dark, but they're basically blind. And they don't have ears really either. They have, you know, little tiny ear flaps if they have anything at all. They're about three to four inches long, except for the queen, who can be a bit bigger. Yeah, talk about the queen because it's very very interesting. And then they have a little short tail, sort of a taper tail, and
then a little piggy snout. But what's really like when you look at a naked mole rat, the first thing you're going to notice is they're naked and really wrinkly and funny looking. And then those chompers up front.
Yeah, because their teeth if you look closely, they come out of their face, not their mouth.
Yeah, they can close their mouth which they still had their teeth out.
Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's an adaptation that they came up with where they can use their teeth to dig while their mouth is close, so they keep dirt from getting in their mouths.
Yeah, it's amazing, And you dug up some extra stuff which is pretty remarkable about those teeth. And we're going to talk a little bit about the teeth, probably a lot about the teeth, but they basically function as a sense organ. Scientists have found that the Sommo man I practiced that one too, So mattisensory cortex that's not even a hard one, which is involved in the sense of touch, is very, very large, and about a third of it
is dedicated to those incisors. So they actually feel through those teeth.
Yeah they yeah, like you said, it's a sense organ. That's really cool. They also use them not only to sense the world, but also to carry stuff around. They can use them like needlenose pliers. They can move them independently in all sorts of different weird directions. They I don't know of any other animal that has teeth as a sense organ. It's pretty cool.
No, how about those jaws too.
So, because their teeth are so important to them, not just for eating, but for digging and creating their habitats and for defense too, their jaws. I think twenty five percent of their entire muscle mass of their body is in their jaws, specifically in the jaw muscle, the deep massiter muscle. If you make if you put three fingers upward on your cheek so that you're kind of making
that scouts on or thing. Sure, the finger closest to you is just touching your ear, the outside of your ear or where your ear touches your face.
I'm doing it.
And then you start making a chewing sound or chewing motion. Do you feel how it's like your cheek is pushing out against your fingers.
Beneath I do.
That's your mass And then do one other thing. Leave your fingers there, don't move, but slide them up a little further to your temple, and then do the same thing. Do you feel that muscle.
Moving, Yeah, that's the headache button exactly.
That's your MASSI muscle as well, So we have them too, but only about one percent of our muscle mass is invested in our jaws. A quarter of their muscle mass is invested in their jaw and specifically in the mass complex.
Yeah, it's amazing, and that makes those teeth. Basically, like it's sort of like a shovel chisel combination. They can shovel. It is shovel. They have tremendous power. Just Snoop Dogg has that train work. So I think we could suit for that. Uh and we'll be like, hey, go after the naked mole rat. Snoop, I saved those sideburns years ago. Uh. So they use them. You know, they're they're scraping, they're
always digging, they're always carrying dirt. Like you mentioned, they can close their little lips because they don't want to get dirt in their mouths, and they're always just sort of at work digging tunnels. They're like Charles Bronson in The Great.
Escape, right pretty much that's who they've modeled their entire society on.
Yeah, and they do this in a little like an assembly line.
Yeah.
They will gnaw into the earth and they will pass dirt back, and eventually that dirt forms what else, a mole hill.
Yeah. I saw those kind of like a conveyor belt. So there's one mole or one naked mole rat at the front doing all the digging, and there's a bunch of mole rats following them that are sweeping like a specific pile out and as they're sweeping it further and further back, and as they're moving backward, they finally get to the end, and then there's a larger mole rat there's kicking it outside, forming that molehill you were talking about.
And then when the when the mole rat that's been sweeping it to the guy who's kicking it out of the tunnel, they climb back over the people in front of them and go to the front of the line again. So it is it's like this conveyor belt that's just tunneling, like boring through the earth. And this is really hard packed dry dirt too. It's not easy stuff to chew through.
No, they make easier work out of it when things are a little wetter, but generally this dirt is fairly dry, like you said, so it's pretty tough. And we mentioned that they're a hairless. They do have some tiny, tiny little hairs here and there. They have some sensory hairs on their faces and tails, and a little bit of hair between their toes, so they can sweep away that dirt like you were talking about. But if you look
at a naked mole rat. I mean, the first thing that you're gonna say is that things naked, and look at those teeth, and I imagine a large one would be terrifying because they're pretty small, like we said, just a few inches.
Yes, did you watch the Smithsonian Naked mole Rat.
Camsh No, but there's so much of that in fast, cheap and out of control. Okay, it's amazing.
I hadn't.
I had not seen them before, and they are really cute. They're so studious and so serious about the digging around and moving around.
That they're doing very hard.
Pushing this thing over there, and they just they're super cute when you watch them. Apparently they're not very aggressive. There's only specific instances where they show aggression, but for the most part, they're pretty peaceful, even though to us they would seem pretty rude because they climb over one another, in part because they are very closely related, so you know they're fine with that, but also because their habitats are enormous, but they still live on top of each other.
Like a naked mole rat. Tunnel system can be comprised of miles of tunnel that's spread out over like five acres of land, and yet when they're when they live together, they live in a really tight, close knit community that they literally crawl on top of each other.
Yeah, they crawl all over each other like it's nothing like they're crawling over like a rock or something. And they are just as good at going backwards as forwards. And when we say that, like we mean it. They they've they've done little races and they found that naked mole rats can go backwards just as fast as they can go forwards and are just as coordinated, which isn't super coordinated, but we're talking naked mole rats here. That's in a smallish tunnel.
Well, I'm pretty stimulated, Chuck. Do you want to take a break.
Yeah, let's take a break. Since you're stimulated.
I got a d stem stuff.
You should know, the stuff you should I should know.
I'm pretty distimmed.
I'm feeling all right now you're feeling good.
Yeah, but I'm gonna get stimulated again, Chuck, because there's so much more, Like we haven't even really tapped into the most amazing stuff about naked mole rats, Like oh, this is still this is neat, this is interesting, but just wait, everybody just you.
Wait, should we talk about respiration?
I think we should.
Well, here's the deal. They are underground in these very tight spaces and down there because there are so many naked mole rats. I don't think we said, but they live in colonies, and we'll get to the social structure because it's very very interesting among mammals for sure, and especially among rodents. But you know, seventy to two hundred to three hundred naked mole rats living together in these
tightish quarters even though it's spread out. You know, they're small tunnels because they're small animals and there's not a lot of oxygen down there. They can get by on a startlingly low amount of oxygen.
Yeah, in an environment that's also high in carbon dioxide. Like you or I would suffocate to death in a naked mole rat tunnel system.
Any animal would, I think, yeah, pretty much.
And the reason why is because they've become adapted to that kind of environment, a low oxygen, high carbon dioxide environment. And the way that they've adapted is they have they have evolved a system that, aside from naked mole rats, has only been found in plants.
That's right, So oh, I don't keep going.
So the toast pump. We all have fructose pumps, but ours are all in our guts. The naked mole rats have a fructose pump that uses a metabolic pathway that takes fructose to be burned for energy in their brains. And the reason fructose is so important is because it can be burned anaerobically. You don't need oxygen to power that system of energy creation or unlocking energy. I guess from the fruit toase you can just do it without oxygen. So they lower their metabolism enough that they don't need
much much oxygen. They can get by on the burning fruit toase until there's more oxygen available. Again.
Yeah, it can live in an atmosphere that is twenty percent oxygen and eighty percent CO two, and they've been able to survive for at least five hours with as little as five percent oxygen. Five percent.
Yeah, you couldn't do that. I think twenty percent is like the andes. Five percent is not much at all. No, So there's another thing I said that they were generally peaceful. They're generally peaceful within the colony. Apparently there's a behavior that queens have where they show up and just start shoving workers around. Did you see that?
Yeah? And they're not quite sure aggressive at times.
Yeah, but it's mostly just the queen and she's mostly shoving workers. They thought maybe they were it was because they were being lazy, but the worker is much more likely to be shoved while they're working, which just seems obnoxious.
Maybe it's just a little reminder. Yeah, yeah, maybe.
But other than that, they aren't very aggressive unless you're a naked molerat from another colony. And from what I saw, if you stumble into a naked morat colony and you're an outsider, they will kill you.
Yeah, it's not pretty. If you're a predator as well, they will band together and stack on one another and reveal those teeth if a centipede or a snake or something comes down there. And U yeah, and like you said, if you're not a member of the family, and I guess we should go ahead and say it like they're all the same family, right. Isn't there a lot of insects going on?
Yeah, let's talk about their incests, shall we. Sure, so they inbreed. The reason why is because they have one queen that's just part of their hierarchy, their social structure, and the Queen has a very limited number of people the breed with. She basically says you, you, and you you're my breeding males. Everybody else not only like, don't breed with the queen. Somehow, mysteriously, the Queen keeps worker males and worker females from even like maturing sexually. Yes,
they have no idea how this is happening. Because if you take a non breeding worker male in a non breeding worker female out of their colony, within days they develop like adult mature reproductive systems and can reproduce. Yeah, like something going on.
A male literally will they have tiny kind of buried testicles, But five days after they're out of that hole, those testicles literally grow.
Yeah, you should see that on fast motion. It's really funny.
Please tell me that's not existent.
Oh but there's a gift out there somewhere. Yeah, okay, I haven't seen it though.
Yeah, but it's it's weird. It's the suppression of reproduce ability, and it's it's the Queen. It's just the Queen and all the other males have their hands up. And only if you get to go in there and take care of business.
Yeah, so very frequently they're her own offspring. That's just how it goes. For a couple of reasons. One, she makes so many she has so many litters over her lifetime. And then also they are there. They are very long lived. I think in captivity they live up to thirty years so far.
I saw longer too. I saw one that was like close to forty.
So we've only been studying them in captivity for about forty ish years, maybe fifty, so we don't really know what they're actual Like the upper limit of their lifespan is. We'll talk about that later. But a mouse, if it's lucky, lives five years in captivity. These guys are living thirty forty years, right, that's old.
Yeah, I saw the Queen's not in captivity. Can it's usually like eighteen to twenty years okay, underground, which is still remarkable.
Yeah, that's super remarkable. So during that time, because she's creating so many letters and there's outsiders who come to the colony get killed, she has to. It's inevitable she's reproducing with her own kin. And so they found genetically, Chuck, that the average genetic similarity between just any two members of a colony is about point five in human terms. Point five is what and their offspring has. These are
just brothers and sisters have zero point five similarity. Yeah, I think between the queen and her offspring, it's like point eight, and you're like, what is all this getting at the highest number you can get to is one point zero, and that's for identical twins that came from the same egg. They're almost genetically perfectly identical. And the queen and her offspring are like at point eight. So they are super duper imbread.
Yeah, they're I mean, it's only them down there. What happens underground stays underground, you know what I'm saying.
I guess.
So the other cool thing or another cool thing about them living underground is that they're basically cold blooded. I think scientifically technically they're probably not, but effectively they are cold blooded mammals because they don't have self regulating body temperature. They regulate their body temperature in a few ways, but they basically call it behavioral regulation thermoregulation. They will work harder sometimes to get there, you know, to get the
heat going. They will stack themselves on one another when it's colder and they will go higher in the tunnel system, closer to the surface to feel that sun's heat, but still not go outside to warm up. When it's colder, they will, I'm sorry, when it's warmer, they will go deeper and have more space in between them and stuff like that.
And yet despite all that, despite not being able to regulate their own temperature, they still maintain about in the eighties fahrenheit. That's how warm it is in a naked mole rat tunnel system, and the humidity is like fifty to sixty percent. It's balmy.
It's balmy. It's warm, and it's not balmy because it's full of water. Because get this, I know you know this. I'm talking to the people in podcast land. I know they don't drink water. They don't say like they try to seal off those tunnels. You know, it's not probably not possible to completely seal them off, but they would flood very easily if they didn't do as good a job as they do already. Sure, but it's not like they dig little water wells and let them fill up
and go lap it up. You know, through those teeth. They don't drink water. They get water from what they eat. We said they didn't go out to find food and stuff. So you're wondering, like, what are they eating, like little insects is stumble in there? No, No, they are eating roots and bulbs and rhizomes and you know tubers, like basically what part of the plant is underground. They're eating that stuff and that's also where they're getting every bit of water they need.
Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Again, like they live in the desert, so this is where desert plants store their waters in like big tubers and bulbs. And typically when a naked mole rat goes out and stumbles into a tuber, they'll start bringing it back to the rest of the colony. Very very good like that. They really look out for one another. But once in a while they'll find a
tuber that's like fifty pounds. It's just huge, and they're no naked mole rat could do anything with that, So they eat it in situ, and they do it in such a way that when they'll bore a hole into this giant tuber, eat the inside flesh and then come back out and they'll plug the hole with dirt and then they'll let the tuber like regenerate, let the plant like regrow, and then they'll go back and do it again once the plant's healthy again.
In that neat, it's amazing. And they're not doing this in any kind of I don't think we mentioned like their their sleep cycles. They're not. They work together like very very well. And we'll talk about that structure more in a minute. But it's not like they get up in the morning. They don't know what morning is. They're underground. Yeah, so, as far as anyone can tell, they don't have any
kind of regular sleep cycle going on. They just they work when they're supposed to work, and they work till they get tired and then they sleep.
Yeah, there's no morning under ground, isn't the grim.
Yeah, but that's a that's a song title of some sort of death metal band. Probably.
I think you could make it the the titular song title for the album.
The Naked Mole Rats. Sure, that's it. That's the name of the man.
I guess No, I mean, like, there is no Morning Underground is the name of the first single and the album.
And the album, and then in parentheses it says like believe me or something like that. Sure, uh, or can we talk I mean, we talked about what they eat, but we should also talk about the other thing they sometimes eat.
I'm kind of excited about this.
Take it away.
Then they eat poop.
They eat their own poop.
They eat their own poop, they eat others poop. Apparently the adults of the colony will poop directly into the mouths of the pups when they need it, when they want it. And this all sounds gross, and it is. I think even other types of mole rats are like, good God, have you seen what our cousins do when we're not around. But there's a good reason for this. This is actually a big strategy. They have a gut
to digest these really hard tubers. This is not the kind of like root vegetables you would get at a grocery store. This is wild sub Saharan Africa tubers that they're eating and trying to digest, and they can't possibly digest it all the first time, so when they poop, it's still chuck full of food, so they don't waste it. They just eat the.
Poop, that's right. And they have a hind gut because you know, herbivores often have things inside their body that are going to help them digest this really vibrus plant matter, and they do have a hind gut that is really good for that, but it's still not good enough. And so like you said, they eat, they poop, they eat it again, and that pretty much takes care of it.
There's one other really cool thing about it, too.
Well.
There's two other cool things about eating poop. One, when the adults poop into the pup's mouths, they're not just feeding them, they're also transferfing gut microbiota, which will help them protect them from disease, will help them digest stuff even better. It's pretty neat. And then they also think we talked about suppressing the reproductiveness of the others, like
the other females, the Queen can somehow repress them. They don't know how she's doing that, but they do think that the reason why other non worker females help raise pops with no incentive whatsoever and with no reproductive organs or hormones is that when they eat the queen's poop, she passes just enough estrogen to them to make them want to take care of the pipes.
That is astounding, it is. And there's one more part to the poop. We mentioned, if you come in and you're from another colony, you're in big trouble. They also think that feeding the poop and also occasionally rolling in the poop is a way that they can impart like a colony smell that everyone's gonna have.
Yeah, so everybody will smell the same. So if somebody shows up, you're like, you're not terry, and then they're dead right, because they can tell from your smell because their sense of smell is just ridiculously acute. That's basically what they have. Smell, touch, and then hearing somehow because they make more vocalizations than any other rodent on the planet, and yet they basically don't have ears, So I'm not sure how they do that.
Yeah, I mean we can talk about that a little bit. They have the queen has a toilet song when she goes poo poo in her toilet chamber. And I guess we should also say that they have different chambers for
different things. They have bathrooms and they have bedrooms. They have these sort of expressway super highways that are a little larger where they're just crawling all over each other back and forth, but they have different rooms and one of them is a bathroom and she sings a little toilet song when she goes, and they think that might be like, hey, I just pooped. Is anyone going to come in here and eat this? Or'm not gonna have
to throw it at you. She also says, hey, you three that I picked out earlier, I'm ready to have intercourse with you. So here here's my song for that. We mentioned those predators there sounds for predator invasions.
Uh.
And then you know, and this might lead us into talking about the social structure, maybe after a break. But they do have little chirps that will signal their social order, which is still not quite figured out. But maybe we'll take a break there and talk about that.
Let's do it, all right, We'll be right back.
Stop. You should know.
So we mentioned early on that they are a part of the Bathier GID Is that right, Yeah, all right, Bathier GID group. And they are generally pretty solitary there. They may live with a few others here and there, but they don't do what naked mole rats do, which is, you know, colonies that can get up into the hundreds. They are the closest thing that you can compare a naked mole rat to is like an ant colony.
Yeah, or bees, like they're like, you find you sociality. They're you social, I think you said before, you find that in the insect world, not in the mammal world. Apparently there's only other one kind of mole rat that has you social hierarchy. But theirs is even like it's just nothing compared to the rigidity of the naked mole rats.
Yeah, so you social means it is like you said, it is rigid. It is very defined. Uh, but they don't fully understand that structure and full they have some little clues. I think some of the males vary in size a little bit, and I think they think that the ones that are a little bigger, maybe higher up on the you know, social structure. They most of them are workers, but some of them, it seems, are specifically soldiers. Yeah, kind of are on the front lines when that scorpion comes down.
Yeah, they have a division of labor. What else, Well, I've got so there. So the fact that they're you social is not intuitive because no one knew that there were such a thing as mammals that were you social. And I found out that they've only known that these things were you social for since like the eighties or nineties, and the way that they found out was really astounding because some of these early naked morat researchers were like,
where are why aren't these these morats pregnant? Like I have not seen a pregnant female because they didn't know that it's just the queen that's creating the litters, right. And there was a biologist named Richard Alexander who described a hypothetical you social mammal species, and somebody who was a researcher named Jennifer Jarvis, who is a naked mole rat researcher, was like, buddy, you just described naked mole rats, and I think you just solved this puzzle, this mystery
that there are actually a you social mammal species. And that's how we figured it out, just totally by chance.
Yeah, and you know, we mentioned the queen a few times. The queen is obviously at the top of that you social structure, and much like bees that we've talked about a lot, that queen runs the show. There is almost always only one queen. I think in rare cases there can be a couple of queens. But when it's time for a new queen to take the crown, there's a big fight. The females sometimes will kill each other to
become queen. Oh yeah, but it's a violent affair to become queen, and they think that this is one of the reasons, one of a few reasons why the queen ends up larger is because you may start out a little larger if you're the one defeating the other females. And then this is another remarkable naked mole rat fact. Once you become queen, your body literally gets longer, your spine linkedins.
Yeah, like I saw a picture I think ed added it in this article. Any of like the first litter queen, you know, five litter queen, ten litter queen, and that like I think the ten litter queen her spine is about at least one and a half times the length of what it would have been during her first litter. That's how significantly their body changes so that they can have larger and larger litters over time.
Yeah, it's it's remarkable. And how many so they can have up to like ten litters total throughout their life.
I think it can get even even larger than that I've seen, and I think that the number of pups in the litter the record is twenty seven.
Oh wow.
Yeah, so they're having a lot, and they can have tons of litters over their lifetime and then as many as you know, twenty seven in a single litter. They're really reproducing. There's a lot of pressure on them to produce, you know what I.
Mean, Oh totally. You know, we mentioned that they almost never never go outside of the cave system and the tunnel system. The very few times that they've seen it happen is like they call it, like a mini migration where they will see one maybe try to go to
a different colony. I don't know if they figured out why they would leave their colony, but periodically that will happen, and they will travel at night of course, because if they went out in the sun in the desert during the day, they would probably fry like little sausages with teeth, Like you said, for.
Sure brought worst. So they also think that one of the main reasons that they would ever leave the colony and go up top is to form a new colony, kind of like a peaceful I guess, a peaceful coup. A bloodless coup that actually leaves the existing queen in place, because you know bees do that when they swarm. That's a bunch of bees in a colony that's gotten overcrowded, going and forming their own colony. Apparently, as you social mammals, that's what naked mole rats do as well. Sometimes.
Yeah, yeah, it's pretty interesting, and I guess we should talk about. The final remarkable fact about naked molerats is that they don't age in the sense that we think about aging. Right, they get older on the calendar, but they have shown a remarkable lack of like their body and their organs and like their tissue and stuff like that showing signs of traditional aging.
Yeah, which I mean they get up to thirty, like six times the average age of a mouse or the far end age of a mouse, and they're just not aging, no inflammation, Their bones don't deteriorate. They just are ageless. And people researchers who started to notice this are like,
what is going on? And they have kind of zeroed in on one particular molecule called the high A lurinon And you might be familiar with higher luronic acid, which people love to put in like their facial moisturizers and stuff like that, because it's found in skin, well, it's also found in naked mole rat skin and it's found in aces. They have ten times the amount that humans do, and the molecules of high A luranon that they do have are like five times larger in size.
Yeah, so they have more, bigger, high alurn molecules and they think that it's possible because they're very resistant to They found out at first they were very resistant to tumors in cancer, and so they're like in the naked mole rat does the is that the secret to curing cancer? And I don't think that anyone is like saying that
they're right around the corner from figuring that out. But they have gotten this high allurn and they have put it in mice and that they because mice are very cancer prone, which is one reason we study mice when we study cancer. But they have found that these mice do much better and they live longer, and they it's almost like an immediate shot of youth when they get this stuff.
Yeah. When they transfer the high alert and on synthase two gene into mice, they really benefit from it. And then on the cancer front, when they when they suppress the tumor suppressing genes that are found in mammals, in the naked mole rats, they still don't get tumors, but when they suppress the gene that expresses high alurinon, they start to get tumors. So they've pretty much zeroed in on high alurinon as some sort of an anti tumor agent.
And it's a gooey sugar and they've shown that when you remove it from a petri dish of naked molerat cells, the cells will goop together, but they won't stick together as long as there's high alurinon in there.
Yeah, and it's in it's in there. Like you said, they're connected tissues. So it's one of the reasons they have that loose, kind of stretchy, weird looking skin is because of this high lurinon And we went over we drove right by. One of the facts that you duck up this pretty amazing is that in their is it their body can move inside their skin without their skin.
Moving, they can turn about halfway around within their skin.
It's that loose, so like they could be doing that in front of your face, and you would not know it because their skin is just static.
Yeah, you'd be like, wow, why is their head over there all of a sudden righter still will seem to be facing forward, doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, And that skin comes in handy when they're calling around those tunnels and slipping by each other and stuff like that. I mean, there are reasons why their skin is like that, and it's just remarkable these old guys.
Yeah, and they think that the anti aging, anti tumor traits that they've developed over time are just a byproduct of the actual adaptation, which is super loose skin that's created by cells that aren't allowed to stick together.
Yeah. And they've also found out that they don't experience pain like other mammals do, and you would, of course the first thing you think of is like, pain is a good thing, because that tells you when you've got your hand on a hot stove or what have you.
That's not the first thing I think of. It's not, no, I think of that's great.
I don't like pain, oh sure, but it's a you know, we have to have pain so we know when we're experiencing something that could kill us. Granted, but they have just enough of a pain receptor to like keep them from dying stupidly, but not enough to actually feel pain. And I saw this one fact, I guess from an
experiment that means like somebody actually did this. They said that their skin doesn't respond to pain when you put acid or cap sasan like what they put in like pepper, you know, hot pepper stuff like in pepper spray, that's cap season, and their skin doesn't react when you put that stuff on their skin.
Yeah, or they don't even if their skin's showing signs of burning. They're just like what, I didn't hear it.
No, their skin literally doesn't respond to ask.
Oh so the skin itself doesn't. The skin itself doesn't, Okay, But I get the impression also that if you like hurt one. I hate to even talk about this, but if you hurt one, it wouldn't even notice it because
it's pain threshold is so high. And the reason they think that this is the case is because their metabolism is so fragile, a on such like a razor's edge, that they think that their nervous system evolved to, like you said, just give them enough pain signals to get by, but not enough to really require a lot of extra energy. They don't need that kind of sensation to survive.
Does that mean in some lab somewhere they draw straws to see who has to thump the naked mole rat.
Yeah, I'll bet that's a bummer day for you at the office, would be for me.
I think that's all the amazing facts. I'm looking over my notes. I don't think there's anything else, is there?
I don't think so. The only thing I would say is go to the Smithsonian Naked mole rat camps as soon as you can. They're very cute to watch.
Yeah, and watch fast, cheap and out of control. It's a great documentary because he somehow managed manages to Errol Morris does to tie each of these professions into a theme, a common theme. It's really interesting And if you think about it, it's robots that this guy's making that look like insects. It's plants that a guy is shaping to look like animals.
Wait, wait, are you spoiling it right now?
No, okay, these are just the jobs they have. The naked mole rat guy. I'm trying to figure out how that figured him that way. I can't remember, it's been a while, but anyway, this guy's enthusiasm the scientists that they found just just very contagious of how much he loves hiss naked mole rat.
I could see it. I mean, you could do a lot worse to pin your career to that animal as a biologist. Like they are just coming up with some amazing stuff.
Greed.
So since I mentioned amazing stuff and Chuck said agreed, that means everybody, it's time for listener.
Now that's right. But I'm going to shout out that naked mole rat guy. His name is Ray Mendez and he's pretty amazing nice all right, So I'm gonna call this. Let me see, I'm gonna open up the folder.
Oh boy, mail you guys, you don't know what this means. When Chuck opens up the folder, it gets real.
Uh oh boy, that's an old one. I'm going to read that one that might be out of date. I'll read, Oh, okay, this is fairly recent. Hoya. I remember we talked about the Georgetown Hoyas and were like, what the heck is a hooya? We heard from a few Hoyas and this was from Mark Mayer or Mark Meyer. Excuse me, Hey guys, first time writer, a longtime listener, graduate of Georgetown, You and I actually have some knowledge to give back. Your answer to the question, was a hoya is? Exactly? Let
me explain. What I was taught was that Georgetown's nickname came from the stone walls, named after the university's beautiful walls or the football team's defense, depending on who you ask, okay, defense the good Jesuits that we are our cheer was the Latin translation of what rocks hoya saksa, and that was eventually shortened to hoya's the mascot change, but the
nickname stuck. So if a Georgetown if you ask a Georgetown student what a hoya is, the standard tongue in cheek response is something like correct or exactly what is a hooya? Because the word hoya literally translates to what what is hoya?
Is?
How I should have read it?
And now I understand why people don't like Georgetown graduates. I never knew, but now I do.
Mark says, this is some nineteenth century who's on first type of fun. I hope this helps. Thanks for the quality entertainment that has gotten me through countless Moe's drives and runs. I guess mowing lawn. Sure, all right, that's for Mark Meyer.
Thanks a lot, Mark, that was great knowledge you imparted. Thank you very much. I can't wait till somebody asks me what's a hoya? Can't wait?
Say exactly?
We can't wait. And if you want to be like Mark and send us some info that we didn't know, you can put it in an email and send it off to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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