October 26, 2023 • 46 mins
Naked mole rats are funny looking to be sure, but neither moles nor rats. So what are they? You'll have to tune in to find out.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Probably that are crime and punishment.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Sure, sure, but I think everybody can get behind you know,
sloths and elephants and not everybody's like sure.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Prison right or crime scene clean up?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
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
(01:08):
are ridiculously interesting.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
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
(01:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Oh yeah, what's his name?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
On the leading edge, not the bleeding edge.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
For real, for real. Yeah. I saw somewhere that National
Geographic described them as bratwurst with teeth.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Oh Man, and apparently.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
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,
(02:55):
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?
Speaker 3 (03:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
They all have the same mother pretty much, I do know.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Look at you.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
No, I think you got it, Beth Ergide.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, I got it the second time, but it should
have rolled off my tongue for as much as I
practiced it.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
That never does.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
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
(04:38):
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
(05:01):
be its own family. Not everybody's on.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Board, Yeah, but I think everyone listening has a family
member that you know, they think maybe should be classified
as their own family.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Always naked buck teeth. Sure that family member rusty uncle Rusty.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
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
(05:39):
of them.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
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
(06:00):
humans tend to dwell, that's a big mark in their
favor from what I.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
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.
(06:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
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.
(06:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
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
(07:41):
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,
(08:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, because their teeth if you look closely, they come
out of their face, not their mouth.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Yeah, they can close their mouth which they still had
their teeth out.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
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,
(09:08):
is very, very large, and about a third of it
is dedicated to those incisors. So they actually feel through
those teeth.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
No, how about those jaws too.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
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
(09:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
I'm doing it.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Beneath I do.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Moving, Yeah, that's the headache button exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:37):
The Great.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Escape, right pretty much that's who they've modeled their entire
society on.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, and they do this in a little like an
assembly line.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
They will gnaw into the earth and they will pass
dirt back, and eventually that dirt forms what else, a
mole hill.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
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
(12:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
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
(12:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yes, did you watch the Smithsonian Naked mole Rat.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Camsh No, but there's so much of that in fast,
cheap and out of control. Okay, it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I hadn't.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
That they're doing very hard.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
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
(13:54):
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
(14:18):
they literally crawl on top of each other.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
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
(14:43):
super coordinated, but we're talking naked mole rats here. That's
in a smallish tunnel.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Well, I'm pretty stimulated, Chuck. Do you want to take
a break.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Yeah, let's take a break. Since you're stimulated.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
I got a d stem stuff.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
You should know, the stuff you should I should know.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I'm pretty distimmed.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
I'm feeling all right now you're feeling good.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Wait, should we talk about respiration?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I think we should.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
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
(16:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Any animal would, I think, yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
That's right, So oh, I don't keep going.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
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
(17:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
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?
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Yeah? And they're not quite sure aggressive at times.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Maybe it's just a little reminder. Yeah, yeah, maybe.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
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
(19:03):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:09):
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
(19:31):
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
(19:52):
breeding worker female out of their colony, within days they
develop like adult mature reproductive systems and can reproduce. Yeah,
like something going on.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Yeah, you should see that on fast motion. It's really funny.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Please tell me that's not existent.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Oh but there's a gift out there somewhere. Yeah, okay,
I haven't seen it though.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
I saw longer too. I saw one that was like
close to forty.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Yeah, I saw the Queen's not in captivity. Can it's
usually like eighteen to twenty years okay, underground, which is
still remarkable.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
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
(21:54):
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
(22:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Yeah, they're I mean, it's only them down there. What
happens underground stays underground, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I guess.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
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.
(22:56):
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
(23:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
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
(24:05):
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
(24:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
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
(25:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, there's no morning under ground, isn't the grim.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah, but that's a that's a song title of some
sort of death metal band. Probably.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
I think you could make it the the titular song
title for the album.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
The Naked Mole Rats. Sure, that's it. That's the name
of the man.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I guess No, I mean, like, there is no Morning
Underground is the name of the first single and the album.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
I'm kind of excited about this.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Take it away.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Then they eat poop.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
They eat their own poop.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
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.
(27:05):
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.
(27:27):
They just eat the.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
There's one other really cool thing about it, too.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Well.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
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
(28:16):
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
(28:39):
want to take care of the pipes.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
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
(29:22):
sure how they do that.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
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
(29:46):
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
(30:07):
intercourse with you. So here here's my song for that.
We mentioned those predators there sounds for predator invasions.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Let's do it, all right, We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Stop. You should know.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
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.
(31:29):
They are the closest thing that you can compare a
naked mole rat to is like an ant colony.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
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
(32:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
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
(32:50):
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
(33:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
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
(33:52):
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.
(34:14):
And then this is another remarkable naked mole rat fact.
Once you become queen, your body literally gets longer, your
spine linkedins.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
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
(34:48):
have larger and larger litters over time.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, it's it's remarkable. And how many so they can
have up to like ten litters total throughout their life.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
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
(35:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
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
(36:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
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
(36:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
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
(37:26):
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
(37:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
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?
(38:18):
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
(38:41):
almost like an immediate shot of youth when they get
this stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
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
(39:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
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
(39:48):
their body can move inside their skin without their skin.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Moving, they can turn about halfway around within their skin.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
That's not the first thing I think of. It's not, no,
I think of that's great.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
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
(41:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Yeah, or they don't even if their skin's showing signs
of burning. They're just like what, I didn't hear it.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
No, their skin literally doesn't respond to ask.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
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,
(42:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
Does that mean in some lab somewhere they draw straws
to see who has to thump the naked mole rat.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yeah, I'll bet that's a bummer day for you at
the office, would be for me.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
I think that's all the amazing facts. I'm looking over
my notes. I don't think there's anything else, is there?
Speaker 2 (42:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
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
(43:11):
like insects. It's plants that a guy is shaping to
look like animals.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Wait, wait, are you spoiling it right now?
Speaker 3 (43:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Greed.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
So since I mentioned amazing stuff and Chuck said agreed,
that means everybody, it's time for listener.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Oh boy, mail you guys, you don't know what this means.
When Chuck opens up the folder, it gets real.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
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
(44:37):
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,
(44:58):
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
(45:23):
a hooya? Because the word hoya literally translates to what
what is hoya?
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Is?
Speaker 3 (45:29):
How I should have read it?
Speaker 2 (45:30):
And now I understand why people don't like Georgetown graduates.
I never knew, but now I do.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
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?
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Say exactly?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Probably that are crime and punishment.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
Sure, sure, but I think everybody can get behind you know,
sloths and elephants and not everybody's like sure.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Prison right or crime scene clean up?
Speaker 2 (00:44):
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
(01:08):
are ridiculously interesting.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
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
(01:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Oh yeah, what's his name?
Speaker 3 (02:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:12):
On the leading edge, not the bleeding edge.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
For real, for real. Yeah. I saw somewhere that National
Geographic described them as bratwurst with teeth.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Oh Man, and apparently.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
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,
(02:55):
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?
Speaker 3 (03:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
They all have the same mother pretty much, I do know.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Look at you.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
No, I think you got it, Beth Ergide.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, I got it the second time, but it should
have rolled off my tongue for as much as I
practiced it.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
That never does.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
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
(04:38):
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
(05:01):
be its own family. Not everybody's on.
Speaker 3 (05:02):
Board, Yeah, but I think everyone listening has a family
member that you know, they think maybe should be classified
as their own family.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
Always naked buck teeth. Sure that family member rusty uncle Rusty.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
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
(05:39):
of them.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
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
(06:00):
humans tend to dwell, that's a big mark in their
favor from what I.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
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.
(06:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
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.
(06:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
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
(07:41):
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,
(08:03):
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.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, because their teeth if you look closely, they come
out of their face, not their mouth.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Yeah, they can close their mouth which they still had
their teeth out.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
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,
(09:08):
is very, very large, and about a third of it
is dedicated to those incisors. So they actually feel through
those teeth.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:36):
No, how about those jaws too.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
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
(09:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
I'm doing it.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Beneath I do.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:37):
Moving, Yeah, that's the headache button exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
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
(11:15):
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
(11:37):
The Great.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Escape, right pretty much that's who they've modeled their entire
society on.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
Yeah, and they do this in a little like an
assembly line.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:45):
They will gnaw into the earth and they will pass
dirt back, and eventually that dirt forms what else, a
mole hill.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
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
(12:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
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
(12:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yes, did you watch the Smithsonian Naked mole Rat.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
Camsh No, but there's so much of that in fast,
cheap and out of control. Okay, it's amazing.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
I hadn't.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
That they're doing very hard.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
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
(13:54):
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
(14:18):
they literally crawl on top of each other.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
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
(14:43):
super coordinated, but we're talking naked mole rats here. That's
in a smallish tunnel.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
Well, I'm pretty stimulated, Chuck. Do you want to take
a break.
Speaker 3 (14:51):
Yeah, let's take a break. Since you're stimulated.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
I got a d stem stuff.
Speaker 1 (15:02):
You should know, the stuff you should I should know.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I'm pretty distimmed.
Speaker 3 (15:30):
I'm feeling all right now you're feeling good.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Wait, should we talk about respiration?
Speaker 2 (15:47):
I think we should.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
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
(16:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Any animal would, I think, yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
That's right, So oh, I don't keep going.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
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
(17:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (17:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:49):
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?
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Yeah? And they're not quite sure aggressive at times.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Maybe it's just a little reminder. Yeah, yeah, maybe.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
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.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
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
(19:03):
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?
Speaker 2 (19:09):
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
(19:31):
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
(19:52):
breeding worker female out of their colony, within days they
develop like adult mature reproductive systems and can reproduce. Yeah,
like something going on.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Yeah, you should see that on fast motion. It's really funny.
Speaker 3 (20:15):
Please tell me that's not existent.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Oh but there's a gift out there somewhere. Yeah, okay,
I haven't seen it though.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
I saw longer too. I saw one that was like
close to forty.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
Yeah, I saw the Queen's not in captivity. Can it's
usually like eighteen to twenty years okay, underground, which is
still remarkable.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
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
(21:54):
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
(22:18):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:30):
Yeah, they're I mean, it's only them down there. What
happens underground stays underground, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
I guess.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
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.
(22:56):
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
(23:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:43):
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
(24:05):
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
(24:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
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
(24:59):
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
(25:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:29):
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
(25:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Yeah, there's no morning under ground, isn't the grim.
Speaker 3 (26:03):
Yeah, but that's a that's a song title of some
sort of death metal band. Probably.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
I think you could make it the the titular song
title for the album.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
The Naked Mole Rats. Sure, that's it. That's the name
of the man.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
I guess No, I mean, like, there is no Morning
Underground is the name of the first single and the album.
Speaker 3 (26:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
I'm kind of excited about this.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Take it away.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
Then they eat poop.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
They eat their own poop.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
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.
(27:05):
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.
(27:27):
They just eat the.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:49):
There's one other really cool thing about it, too.
Speaker 3 (27:51):
Well.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
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
(28:16):
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
(28:39):
want to take care of the pipes.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
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
(29:22):
sure how they do that.
Speaker 3 (29:24):
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
(29:46):
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
(30:07):
intercourse with you. So here here's my song for that.
We mentioned those predators there sounds for predator invasions.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Uh.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Let's do it, all right, We'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
Stop. You should know.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
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.
(31:29):
They are the closest thing that you can compare a
naked mole rat to is like an ant colony.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
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.
Speaker 3 (31:56):
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
(32:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (32:29):
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
(32:50):
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
(33:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:29):
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
(33:52):
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.
(34:14):
And then this is another remarkable naked mole rat fact.
Once you become queen, your body literally gets longer, your
spine linkedins.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
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
(34:48):
have larger and larger litters over time.
Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, it's it's remarkable. And how many so they can
have up to like ten litters total throughout their life.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:09):
Oh wow.
Speaker 2 (35:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:23):
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
(35:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
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
(36:19):
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.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
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
(36:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
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
(37:26):
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
(37:47):
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.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
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?
(38:18):
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
(38:41):
almost like an immediate shot of youth when they get
this stuff.
Speaker 2 (38:44):
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
(39:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
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
(39:48):
their body can move inside their skin without their skin.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Moving, they can turn about halfway around within their skin.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:22):
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.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
That's not the first thing I think of. It's not, no,
I think of that's great.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
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
(41:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (41:39):
Yeah, or they don't even if their skin's showing signs
of burning. They're just like what, I didn't hear it.
Speaker 3 (41:45):
No, their skin literally doesn't respond to ask.
Speaker 2 (41:46):
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,
(42:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:22):
Does that mean in some lab somewhere they draw straws
to see who has to thump the naked mole rat.
Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yeah, I'll bet that's a bummer day for you at
the office, would be for me.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
I think that's all the amazing facts. I'm looking over
my notes. I don't think there's anything else, is there?
Speaker 2 (42:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:48):
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
(43:11):
like insects. It's plants that a guy is shaping to
look like animals.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
Wait, wait, are you spoiling it right now?
Speaker 3 (43:19):
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.
Speaker 2 (43:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (43:46):
Greed.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
So since I mentioned amazing stuff and Chuck said agreed,
that means everybody, it's time for listener.
Speaker 3 (43:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:08):
Oh boy, mail you guys, you don't know what this means.
When Chuck opens up the folder, it gets real.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
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
(44:37):
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,
(44:58):
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
(45:23):
a hooya? Because the word hoya literally translates to what
what is hoya?
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Is?
Speaker 3 (45:29):
How I should have read it?
Speaker 2 (45:30):
And now I understand why people don't like Georgetown graduates.
I never knew, but now I do.
Speaker 3 (45:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (45:53):
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?
Speaker 3 (46:01):
Say exactly?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
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.
Speaker 3 (46:16):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows
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Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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