Naked mole rats are small, furless mammals. They live mainly around Ethiopia. They spend all their life in underground tunnels which they dig themselves with their teeth and claws. They have adapted to life underground by being able to walk in either direction along a tunnel, they move just as quickly backwards as forward

A Description Of A Naked Mole Rat

A naked mole rat is about ten to fifteen centimetres long. They have claws which are one of their main digging tools, these claws are covered in a velvet like substance, they also use their nose to move loose rubble out of the way, these noses are like that of a cat and are used for sensing ground vibrations and they also use the hairs on their nose for finding their way around the many labyrinths of tunnels. Eyesight is not important underground because in a tunnel you are more likely to smell, hear or feel a predator before you see it, so naked mole rats have evolved to make do with very little eyesight, that, because of their constant life underground is very easily damaged by sunlight. Their teeth that were mentioned earlier are on the outside of their lips, so that they can use their teeth in tunnelling without getting their mouths full of soil. Their teeth keep growing so they have to keep gnawing to file them down. If you set up a colony of naked mole rats in captivity, you have to provide them with something hard such as a block of concrete for them to chew on.

Naked Mole Rat Society

The naked mole rat society is a very simple one. There is a pyramid. At the top there is a King (we will come to him later) and Queen who spends her entire life breeding, and everyone else is a worker of some kind.

The Queen

The Queen plays a very important role in naked mole rat society. This is because naked mole rats are the only known mammals that operate a hive system, with one queen who does all the breeding and lots of workers who have no children of their own. Scientists don't yet understand why they do this, as evolution favours the individual and workers should have more to gain from having children themselves. (Bee and Wasp genetics are totally different and in their case the workers have an evolutionary advantage to helping the queen's offspring).

The Labourers

The labourers build new tunnels and expand the society of the moles. Life for a worker mole is very difficult and hard. The moles are worked to death and get minimal food and water and only stop for rest, which they spend all together in one big heap because they love each other, they are always touching, but they are the strongest out of all the naked mole rat society, because of all the hard work.

The Warriors

The third type of position in naked mole rat society is that of a warrior. This could be a sentry guard, who will alert the naked mole rats if a predator approaches. It could also be a slave driver; these naked mole rats keep the workers in check and drag off any naked mole rats who die through exhaustion. They have many predators in the wild so warriors are very important. They also use teamwork to defeat enemies a good example of this is against a snake. Their defence against snakes involves a soldier attacking the snake while the workers, kick dust into the tunnel behind him to protect the queen. This shows the naked mole rats love for each other and the queen.

The King

The king in a naked mole rat society can be easily overthrown; this is because the Queen will want new genes into her family. Worker naked mole rats often make a run for it. They wait until it is night and run as fast as they can out of the tunnels. Once outside the naked mole rat runs towards the nearest naked mole rat society, that is not their own, and go into it. They could run for up to ten miles to find this new home. The worker naked mole rat can normally fight their way through the sentry guards, and any other guards the naked mole rat might meet, because of all the hard labour they have done, but if they are caught they will be killed. The way a naked mole rat can tell the difference between someone from their own society is the way they build their underground toilet chambers and waddle though this smelly space so that they pick up a distinctive odour which enables them to instantly recognize and attack intruders. Once he has made it through all the guards the naked mole rat heads straight towards the Queen; the fact that he is a visitor from a different society makes him the equivalent of a sex god, so the naked mole rat will spend the rest of his short life breading. Unfortunately a female worker naked mole rat can not do the same as the male and run of to a different home because the King is not as fickle as a the Queen and he will mate for life.

Naked Mole Rats Dietary Needs

If you invite or are invited by a naked mole rat round to dinner then you can be expected to eat a mixture of grass shoots, worms and so on. You must finish your plate though because it is considered rude in naked mole rat society to waste food because they get so little.

Where To See Naked Mole Rats

Naked mole rats are not normally kept in captivity, because you need to keep large numbers of them for the naked mole rats to be happy, but if you have the space they can live quite happy in captivity. If you would like to see naked mole rats in captivity then they are sometimes kept in zoos Bristol zoo as an example, also there is a settlement in the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. The other place to see them is the wild but this is very rare.