I've been thinking about moles (spurred on by an old post by Linda in my thread called The Four Faces), in which she venerates the mole as one of the keepers of the six cardinal directions (underfoot) given by the native American peoples of the Texas area.
THE NAKED MOLE RAT, native to parts of eastern Africa, is an extremely weird looking critter to my human eyes. This critter has not one but three GREAT TRICKS - or you could just lump them under the term SUPER POWERS. Forget Marvel Comics - these critters already exist on our planet and have lived on it for eons of time.
I sometimes do see people's animal totems in their aura and I once saw a naked mole rat (first time I had ever heard of it - and had to look it up) in one woman where I worked at a day job. When I see the animal totem, I am not trying to pick something just to be mean - I really do see that animal as their totem. It turns out that metaphysically I may have been picking up that this woman had some highly developed powers of her own!
First, here are some fun facts about naked mole rats. The information comes from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (which incidentally has a naked mole rat cam in action on their exhibit, if you ever get to visit there).
https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/news/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-naked-mole-rats
This is what Wikipedia has to say about mole rats:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat
The naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber), also known as the sand puppy, is a burrowing rodent….The naked mole-rat is native to the drier parts of the tropical grasslands of East Africa, predominantly southern Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia.
Clusters averaging 75 to 80 individuals live together in complex systems of burrows in arid African deserts. The tunnel systems built by naked mole-rats can stretch up to three to five kilometres (2–3 miles) in cumulative length.
They are well-adapted to their underground existence. Their eyes are quite small, and their visual acuity is poor. Their legs are thin and short; however, they are highly adept at moving underground and can move backward as fast as they can move forward. Their large, protruding teeth are used to dig and their lips are sealed just behind the teeth, preventing soil from filling their mouths while digging. About a quarter of their musculature is used in the closing of their jaws while they dig—about the same proportion that is utilized in the human leg. They have little hair (hence the common name) and wrinkled pink or yellowish skin. They lack an insulating layer in the skin.
The relationships between the queen and the breeding males may last for many years; other females are temporarily sterile. Queens live from 13 to 18 years, and are extremely hostile to other females behaving like queens, or producing hormones for becoming queens. When the queen dies, another female takes her place, sometimes after a violent struggle with her competitors. Once established, the new queen's body expands the space between the vertebrae in her backbone to become longer and ready to bear pups…..
Naked mole-rats feed primarily on very large tubers (weighing as much as a thousand times the body weight of a typical mole-rat) that they find deep underground through their mining operations. A single tuber can provide a colony with a long-term source of food—lasting for months, or even years, as they eat the inside but leave the outside, allowing the tuber to regenerate. Symbiotic bacteria in their intestines ferment the fibers, allowing otherwise indigestible cellulose to be turned into volatile fatty acids…..
Naked mole rats are primarily preyed upon by snakes—especially the Rufous beaked snake and Kenyan sand boa—as well as various raptors. They are at their most vulnerable when constructing mounds and ejecting soil to the surface….
Now, for those interested in their SUPER POWERS, here is some information from various sources:-
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128428-the-incredible-naked-mole-rat-can-survive-with-hardly-any-oxygen/
New Scientist daily newsletter 20-4-2017
We already know the naked mole rat is an animal superhero: it is long-lived for an animal of its size, rarely gets cancer and shrugs off some kinds of pain. Now the East African rodent turns out to have a metabolic trick that allows it to survive very low oxygen levels with no apparent ill effects.
To investigate how well naked mole rats … tolerate low oxygen concentrations, a team of biologists first put them in a chamber with just 5 per cent oxygen, less than a quarter the amount found in air. Such conditions kill mice within 15 minutes (and we wouldn’t survive either).
But naked mole rats just carry on as normal. The first test was stopped after 5 hours when nothing happened, says Thomas Park at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “We were blown away.” … Diving mammals such as whales can hold their breath for over an hour. But between dives they breathe normal air at the surface and store oxygen in their tissues to help them survive. Naked mole rats, by contrast, live in underground colonies of up to 300 animals where oxygen is likely to always be in short supply…. So how do they cope with the resulting lack of oxygen? Partly by minimising their need for it. Naked mole rats burn little energy heating their bodies, instead staying at the same temperature as their burrows – around 30 °C.
They also have a low metabolism and go into a sort of suspended animation in zero oxygen. But a clever metabolic trick helps them survive, too.
Animal cells get their energy from “burning” the simple sugar glucose. When there is no oxygen, these cells must use far more glucose to get the same amount of energy, and the process produces lactic acid. High lactic acid levels can kill cells, says team member Jane Reznick, also at the Max Delbrück Center, so a feedback system soon kicks in to shut down the process.
But if cells use the sugar fructose instead, they can bypass this system and keep producing energy. And that’s exactly what naked mole rats do: they release fructose into their bloodstream when oxygen drops too low, and the sugar is taken up by heart and brain cells to keep critical systems running.
…Besides naked mole rats, the epaulette shark is one of the few animals known to survive being deprived of oxygen at normal temperatures.
https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/naked-mole-rats-not-mole-not-rat-and-not-african-mole-rat
(The zoologists mentioned in this article on the website Fieldmuseum.org are Bruce Patterson, MacArthur Curator of Mammals at The Field Museum and graduate student Nate Upham (now a Field Museum Research Associate and post-doc at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, as at December 1st, 2014)
“Fossils allow researchers to establish the timing of various branching points on the tree by setting a minimum date for the appearance of a particular lineage,” said Upham. They noted that the naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus) had diverged from other African mole-rats (Bathyergidae) about 31 Million years ago in the early Oligocene.
Finally, Patterson and Upham read up on the subject. Because naked mole-rats have been studied extensively for their extraordinary longevity and resistance to cancer, much has been written about them. This enabled the researchers to review the literature and note all sorts of differences that evolved after their separation from African mole-rats, which justified placing them off in a family of their own. …. Classifications convey information about how different things are. By separating the naked-mole rats into their own family, scientists will be able to better understand its biology and evolutionary history relative to other African mole-rats.
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-naked-mole-rat-impervious-pain-cancer.html
(less than 50% of article cited)
As the name might suggest, naked mole-rats buck the mammalian trend by almost completely lacking hair or fur. Living underground in complex networks of tunnels in East Africa, their thermally stable environment means that a few orientation-aiding bodily hairs and facial whiskers are all they need. Lacking evolutionary pressure to regulate their body temperature, they're also the only known cold-blooded mammal on the planet….
The way naked mole-rats mate and socially organise is more akin to certain insect species than to mammals. Like some species of bees and ants, naked mole-rats are eusocial, living in 100-strong groups headed by a sole breeding female, the queen. But while insects command their colonies with pheromones, the naked mole-rat queen uses physical aggression to keep their groups digging tunnels, foraging, and defending entrances….
Not content with just being immune to cancer, naked mole-rats are also impervious to some normally agonising chemical stimuli, such as capsaicin (the substance that makes chilli peppers taste hot) and acid (what gives lemon juice and vinegar their kick). For their acid-insensitivity, researchers are clearer about why. A subtle difference in one particular molecule of the animal's pain-sensing nerves turns acid into an anaesthetic. That is, rather than stimulating pain-sensing nerves, it actually numbs them—just like an anaesthetic that your dentist administers before the drilling starts. Sadly, this superpower only works with specific chemical stimuli—heat and pressure are just as damaging to them as us.
Scientists are now further studying the naked mole-rat to see whether we might be able to make the human pain system similarly impervious to acid pain. This could be extremely useful for cancer and arthritis sufferers, for whom build-ups of acid in body tissue can be a major contributor to chronic pain….
Naked mole-rats are also highly resilient to low oxygen conditions. Their nerve cells can function for almost one hour in the complete absence of oxygen, by instead using fructose to power energy production. In studying this remarkable ability, my lab and others are hoping to uncover novel treatments to prevent brain damage in stroke patients.
https://www.britannica.com/story/the-naked-mole-rats-latest-superpower
Naked mole rats … are unlikely to win any beauty contests in the animal world, but they have some amazing abilities. … They have strong blunt heads with incisor teeth that protrude in front of their mouth and are used for digging. The naked mole rats are small, typically weighing about 80 grams (2.8 ounces), and generally bald, with pinkish wrinkled skin. They are renowned for their extremely low cancer rates, their slow rate of aging, and their pain resistance. As if that weren’t enough, it was recently discovered that they possess one additional superpower.
In 2013 a cell biologist from the University of Rochester revealed that the sugar molecule hyaluronan is the key to the animal’s cancer resistance. Although hyaluronan can be found in all animals, playing a role in how cells multiply and stick together, the hyaluronan molecule is supersized in naked mole rats, and it is not broken down by enzymes as quickly as it is in other animals. It appears that the buildup of hyaluronan inside the bodies of the naked mole rats keeps their cells from clumping together to form tumors.
THE NAKED MOLE RAT, native to parts of eastern Africa, is an extremely weird looking critter to my human eyes. This critter has not one but three GREAT TRICKS - or you could just lump them under the term SUPER POWERS. Forget Marvel Comics - these critters already exist on our planet and have lived on it for eons of time.
I sometimes do see people's animal totems in their aura and I once saw a naked mole rat (first time I had ever heard of it - and had to look it up) in one woman where I worked at a day job. When I see the animal totem, I am not trying to pick something just to be mean - I really do see that animal as their totem. It turns out that metaphysically I may have been picking up that this woman had some highly developed powers of her own!
First, here are some fun facts about naked mole rats. The information comes from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (which incidentally has a naked mole rat cam in action on their exhibit, if you ever get to visit there).
https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/news/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-naked-mole-rats
- A naked mole rat can move each of its front teeth separately – like a pair of chopsticks.
- Naked mole rats don’t drink water – they get all the hydration they need from their plant-based diet. Mole rats eat the underground parts of plants. They typically only consume part of a root or tuber, providing a future for the eco-system they depend on.
- The average single litter is 12-28 pups, and at birth one baby may weigh less than a penny.
- A quarter of a mole-rat’s muscle mass is in its jaws.
- Although naked mole rats are mammals, their social structure is like that of ants. They live in underground colonies and have a breeding queen, and have worker and soldier mole rats. If a predator, such as a snake, tries to enter a tunnel, the soldier mole rats will fight before letting a predator into the burrow to eat the queen.
- Naked mole rats are long-lived for a small rodent, living up to 30 years, compared to other rodent species only living for a few years.
- Mole rats have 17 different vocalisations, communicating with each other by using chirps, hisses and other sounds. Also, as they are virtually blind through living underground, their sense of smell is very heightened.
- A single colony’s tunnels can be 2.5 miles long. The larger colonies produce complex underground systems of tunnels that connect chambers within the burrow. Mole rats use these chambers for different activities such as nesting and eating. They even designate a toilet room. (My comment: you would, wouldn’t you, as you are going to live for 30 years!)
- Naked mole rats eat their poop, a practice called coprophagy, the re-ingestion of feces, which helps maximise the nutrient uptake. (My comment: have you quietly observed your dog, lately?)
- Naked mole rats often sleep on their backs, lying down (this can be called belly-up).
This is what Wikipedia has to say about mole rats:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Mammalia |
| Order: | Rodentia |
| Family: | Heterocephalidae Landry, 1957; Patterson, 2014 |
| Genus: | Heterocephalus Rüppell, 1842 |
| Species: | H. glaber |
Heterocephalus glaber Rüppell, 1842 |
The naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber), also known as the sand puppy, is a burrowing rodent….The naked mole-rat is native to the drier parts of the tropical grasslands of East Africa, predominantly southern Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia.
Clusters averaging 75 to 80 individuals live together in complex systems of burrows in arid African deserts. The tunnel systems built by naked mole-rats can stretch up to three to five kilometres (2–3 miles) in cumulative length.
They are well-adapted to their underground existence. Their eyes are quite small, and their visual acuity is poor. Their legs are thin and short; however, they are highly adept at moving underground and can move backward as fast as they can move forward. Their large, protruding teeth are used to dig and their lips are sealed just behind the teeth, preventing soil from filling their mouths while digging. About a quarter of their musculature is used in the closing of their jaws while they dig—about the same proportion that is utilized in the human leg. They have little hair (hence the common name) and wrinkled pink or yellowish skin. They lack an insulating layer in the skin.
The relationships between the queen and the breeding males may last for many years; other females are temporarily sterile. Queens live from 13 to 18 years, and are extremely hostile to other females behaving like queens, or producing hormones for becoming queens. When the queen dies, another female takes her place, sometimes after a violent struggle with her competitors. Once established, the new queen's body expands the space between the vertebrae in her backbone to become longer and ready to bear pups…..
Naked mole-rats feed primarily on very large tubers (weighing as much as a thousand times the body weight of a typical mole-rat) that they find deep underground through their mining operations. A single tuber can provide a colony with a long-term source of food—lasting for months, or even years, as they eat the inside but leave the outside, allowing the tuber to regenerate. Symbiotic bacteria in their intestines ferment the fibers, allowing otherwise indigestible cellulose to be turned into volatile fatty acids…..
Naked mole rats are primarily preyed upon by snakes—especially the Rufous beaked snake and Kenyan sand boa—as well as various raptors. They are at their most vulnerable when constructing mounds and ejecting soil to the surface….
Now, for those interested in their SUPER POWERS, here is some information from various sources:-
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2128428-the-incredible-naked-mole-rat-can-survive-with-hardly-any-oxygen/
New Scientist daily newsletter 20-4-2017
We already know the naked mole rat is an animal superhero: it is long-lived for an animal of its size, rarely gets cancer and shrugs off some kinds of pain. Now the East African rodent turns out to have a metabolic trick that allows it to survive very low oxygen levels with no apparent ill effects.
To investigate how well naked mole rats … tolerate low oxygen concentrations, a team of biologists first put them in a chamber with just 5 per cent oxygen, less than a quarter the amount found in air. Such conditions kill mice within 15 minutes (and we wouldn’t survive either).
But naked mole rats just carry on as normal. The first test was stopped after 5 hours when nothing happened, says Thomas Park at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “We were blown away.” … Diving mammals such as whales can hold their breath for over an hour. But between dives they breathe normal air at the surface and store oxygen in their tissues to help them survive. Naked mole rats, by contrast, live in underground colonies of up to 300 animals where oxygen is likely to always be in short supply…. So how do they cope with the resulting lack of oxygen? Partly by minimising their need for it. Naked mole rats burn little energy heating their bodies, instead staying at the same temperature as their burrows – around 30 °C.
They also have a low metabolism and go into a sort of suspended animation in zero oxygen. But a clever metabolic trick helps them survive, too.
Animal cells get their energy from “burning” the simple sugar glucose. When there is no oxygen, these cells must use far more glucose to get the same amount of energy, and the process produces lactic acid. High lactic acid levels can kill cells, says team member Jane Reznick, also at the Max Delbrück Center, so a feedback system soon kicks in to shut down the process.
But if cells use the sugar fructose instead, they can bypass this system and keep producing energy. And that’s exactly what naked mole rats do: they release fructose into their bloodstream when oxygen drops too low, and the sugar is taken up by heart and brain cells to keep critical systems running.
…Besides naked mole rats, the epaulette shark is one of the few animals known to survive being deprived of oxygen at normal temperatures.
https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/naked-mole-rats-not-mole-not-rat-and-not-african-mole-rat
(The zoologists mentioned in this article on the website Fieldmuseum.org are Bruce Patterson, MacArthur Curator of Mammals at The Field Museum and graduate student Nate Upham (now a Field Museum Research Associate and post-doc at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, as at December 1st, 2014)
“Fossils allow researchers to establish the timing of various branching points on the tree by setting a minimum date for the appearance of a particular lineage,” said Upham. They noted that the naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus) had diverged from other African mole-rats (Bathyergidae) about 31 Million years ago in the early Oligocene.
Finally, Patterson and Upham read up on the subject. Because naked mole-rats have been studied extensively for their extraordinary longevity and resistance to cancer, much has been written about them. This enabled the researchers to review the literature and note all sorts of differences that evolved after their separation from African mole-rats, which justified placing them off in a family of their own. …. Classifications convey information about how different things are. By separating the naked-mole rats into their own family, scientists will be able to better understand its biology and evolutionary history relative to other African mole-rats.
https://phys.org/news/2019-06-naked-mole-rat-impervious-pain-cancer.html
(less than 50% of article cited)
As the name might suggest, naked mole-rats buck the mammalian trend by almost completely lacking hair or fur. Living underground in complex networks of tunnels in East Africa, their thermally stable environment means that a few orientation-aiding bodily hairs and facial whiskers are all they need. Lacking evolutionary pressure to regulate their body temperature, they're also the only known cold-blooded mammal on the planet….
The way naked mole-rats mate and socially organise is more akin to certain insect species than to mammals. Like some species of bees and ants, naked mole-rats are eusocial, living in 100-strong groups headed by a sole breeding female, the queen. But while insects command their colonies with pheromones, the naked mole-rat queen uses physical aggression to keep their groups digging tunnels, foraging, and defending entrances….
Not content with just being immune to cancer, naked mole-rats are also impervious to some normally agonising chemical stimuli, such as capsaicin (the substance that makes chilli peppers taste hot) and acid (what gives lemon juice and vinegar their kick). For their acid-insensitivity, researchers are clearer about why. A subtle difference in one particular molecule of the animal's pain-sensing nerves turns acid into an anaesthetic. That is, rather than stimulating pain-sensing nerves, it actually numbs them—just like an anaesthetic that your dentist administers before the drilling starts. Sadly, this superpower only works with specific chemical stimuli—heat and pressure are just as damaging to them as us.
Scientists are now further studying the naked mole-rat to see whether we might be able to make the human pain system similarly impervious to acid pain. This could be extremely useful for cancer and arthritis sufferers, for whom build-ups of acid in body tissue can be a major contributor to chronic pain….
Naked mole-rats are also highly resilient to low oxygen conditions. Their nerve cells can function for almost one hour in the complete absence of oxygen, by instead using fructose to power energy production. In studying this remarkable ability, my lab and others are hoping to uncover novel treatments to prevent brain damage in stroke patients.
https://www.britannica.com/story/the-naked-mole-rats-latest-superpower
Naked mole rats … are unlikely to win any beauty contests in the animal world, but they have some amazing abilities. … They have strong blunt heads with incisor teeth that protrude in front of their mouth and are used for digging. The naked mole rats are small, typically weighing about 80 grams (2.8 ounces), and generally bald, with pinkish wrinkled skin. They are renowned for their extremely low cancer rates, their slow rate of aging, and their pain resistance. As if that weren’t enough, it was recently discovered that they possess one additional superpower.
In 2013 a cell biologist from the University of Rochester revealed that the sugar molecule hyaluronan is the key to the animal’s cancer resistance. Although hyaluronan can be found in all animals, playing a role in how cells multiply and stick together, the hyaluronan molecule is supersized in naked mole rats, and it is not broken down by enzymes as quickly as it is in other animals. It appears that the buildup of hyaluronan inside the bodies of the naked mole rats keeps their cells from clumping together to form tumors.
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