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How many mysteries can we actually hold in the palm of our hand
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What if I told you the naked mole rat was one such mystery? Here, I'll show you what I mean
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In the deep, dark depths of the internet, I found this educational film made in London in 1952
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It's an introduction of sorts to heterocephalus glaber, or better known as the Naked Mole Rat
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This extraordinary little animal comes from East Africa, where he lives in the savannah lands on the edge of the desert
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Most of his life is spent underground. Like me, he has only a few scattered airs which sprout out of his body
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Good questions, please just look at that. Nowhere in the film does the narrator mention that Naked Mole Rats are eusocial
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Eusocial meaning they live in cooperative broods. Think ants, termites, and bees
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There are queens and workers, mating and non-mating groups. Now, there are only two mammalian species considered truly eusocial
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and both are species of mole rat. That's a fact you'd think a film about the awesome animal might mention, right
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Because it had already been 100 years since the mole rat was scientifically described
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But it wasn't until 1984 that a zoologist, Jennifer Jarvis, first observed Naked Mole Rat's complex, cooperative society
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Maybe now you see what I mean. A Naked Mole Rat-sized mystery, literally in the palm of this guy's hand
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But why do these creatures have this unique social structure? And how is it connected to their unusual abilities
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Because they have some pretty unusual abilities. For example, they can live for 30 years, which is totally unusual given its size
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They rarely get cancer. They can survive 18 minutes without oxygen. And then there's arguably the species' most compelling quirk
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a perplexing environmental trigger naked mole rats share with some humans All because of a genetic mutation only naked mole rats and these humans have
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This is psychology professor Dan McCluskey. And yeah, he's surrounded by naked mole rats
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When I tell people about my research, in some ways, what I'm doing is looking at computers
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and seeing when small hairless rodents use the toilet. Okay, maybe that's an oversimplification
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What McCluskey's done is recreate a colony of naked mole rats inside his lab
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Their secretive underground world in Africa is now on display in a Tupperware kingdom in Staten Island
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By using radio frequency identification, or RFID, we basically put a chip under the skin of each one of the animals in every single colony
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and track their movements 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, more than 10 times a second
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Here's a question. Why watch every single micro movement? of 300 small, hairless rodents
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It's interesting to consider naked mole rats almost the humans of the rodent kingdom
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We have more genes in common with naked mole rats than we do with your typical laboratory animals, mice and rats
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So we can learn things about our genes, probably by studying the naked mole rat
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McCluskey calls naked mole rats superheroes. They are superheroes in many ways
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They can do things that we can't do. They live in ways that we don't live and couldn't fathom living
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They live in conditions that we couldn't tolerate. Their vulnerability, sort of ironically, is our world
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Naked mole rats are not, in most cases, designed to go above ground. The nest is the perfect environment, and their physiology is really built around that nest environment to be ideally suited for it
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So if you take any naked mole rat and put them in a condition that reproduces what they might experience in East Africa above the ground
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110 degrees, normal air, they'll actually have an epileptic seizure. Which brings us back to why we're tracking mole rats. Because, as it turns out, one of the
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mysteries encoded in their DNA could be very important to humans. And we think the gene that
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makes the naked mole rat sensitive to environment is the same one that makes certain humans with family histories of certain forms of epilepsy schizophrenia and autism sensitive to the environment as well
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Adult naked mole rats in many ways are affected by environment very much the same way that human babies would be
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For example, so when kids before the age of five have a fever of about 103, their body warms up and as a result they start hyperventilating
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They breathe faster. Oxygen is good. Carbon dioxide is bad. Right? Well, it's not that simple
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Yeah, oxygen is the key ingredient in breathing. But CO2 also plays an important role inside our bodies
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When a person has a panic attack, we know that there are changes in their brain and body
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And one of the ways to calm them down is to re-breathe their own air, to have them breathe higher levels of carbon dioxide
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We need CO2 to keep things in balance. So when kids with certain genetic predispositions have a fever and lose carbon dioxide..
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As a result, they have a seizure. And this is a great opportunity for us to try to figure out exactly how you get from hyperventilation and loss of CO2 to that seizure
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Naked mole rats have been around for about 35 million years. They probably evolved from old-world porcupines, moving to life underground
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The answer to preventing these seizures in humans might be in better understanding what it's like to live down there
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What it's like to be a naked mole rat in a world so unlike ours
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When you have 300 naked mole rats piled on in one nest area within an entire burrow
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we see that the CO2 levels are extraordinary. They're much higher than humans could tolerate
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We know that the levels of CO2 that these animals experience in their nest is like putting 1,100 people in an 8x8 elevator, right
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So these are extreme conditions that none of us would want to experience, but yet this is what they seek out
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We have reason to believe that their brains are very much like a newborn brain in humans
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and that they have a specific need for a high level of CO2 in order for them to feel calm
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So evolution has shaped this vulnerability into a power into keeping them together and clustered in their nest and working in high numbers to coordinate their activity If they not relaxing in the nest they out working
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And if they're not doing one of those two things, they're likely to feel anxious or, worse, have a seizure
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Naked mole rats are bound together. 300 naked mole rats exhale. 300 naked mole rats feel calmer
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And 300 naked mole rats don't have a seizure, A cycle that keeps them in one colony for their whole lives
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But that also means they can't leave. One of the big mysteries about naked mole rats is
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okay, perfectly fine, you have this family of animals that live together in this large colony
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and you're telling me that they can't leave the colony, otherwise they're at serious risk of dying
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So how do you get more than one family of naked mole rats? There must be exceptions to the rule
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We see occasionally that some animals are resting in the non-nest areas of our colonies
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And we think that that's telling us that these animals might be habituating to normal air
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and becoming more used to the air that we breathe so that they could be more equipped to become above ground
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This is amazing. What he's saying is they don't need the same CO2 levels as the rest of their colony
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They can undergo a physiological change that makes them well-suited for the above ground environment
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They look different. They behave different. We think it's something systemic, something that's in their blood
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and maybe something that we can treat people with to make them less prone to fever-induced seizures
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or maybe some issues with epilepsy, schizophrenia, and autism. So maybe naked mole rats figured this out 35 million years ago
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and we just have to follow their lead and figure out how to do it. It's the next naked mole rat-sized mystery to solve
