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Posted on 12/18/2018 8:34:29 AM PST by Gamecock
At last, we’ve reached the conclusion of this scintillating drama: the National Zoo’s naked mole-rat colony has chosen its queen.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, let us catch you up: the Small Mammal House at the Smithsonian National Zoo is home to a colony of naked mole-rats, and for the last several months they’ve been engaged in a quiet—but brutal—battle for political supremacy. Naked mole-rats are one of just two eusocial mammalian species, which means they live much like colonies of bees or ants: one queen reigns supreme over everybody else, and challengers must fight and kill her for their own shot at rulership. Only the queen is allowed to reproduce, and her subjects are assigned roles as she sees fit (perhaps the only mole-rats with a better deal are the few lucky males she chooses as mating partners).
Back in October, keepers at the National Zoo told DCist they were pretty sure who the queen of this brood would be. One mole-rat was much larger than all the rest, and she was pushing and shoving her way to dominance without much obvious opposition from the others. But a human can’t know the heart of a mole-rat, and spokesperson Devin Murphy assured us that there could be a challenger at any time. “We won’t know for sure until [one of the mole-rats] has babies. That’s the only way to tell,” she said.
Well, the big day has finally arrived: just after 9 a.m. on Monday, zookeepers checking on the mole-rat colony discovered two tiny, pink, wrinkly nubbins nestled in one of the mole-rat chambers with some adults. Her majesty gave birth to two babies during the night. She has officially been crowned. (Take a gander at the lil guys on the zoo’s naked mole-rat cam).
“It was the mole-rat we expected,” says Kenton Kearns, zookeeper at the National Zoo and mole-rat expert. Over the last several weeks, Kearns says, the queen’s nipples had grown significantly, increasing suspicions that she was the Chosen One. “There was also some movement under the skin in the back end of her body, which looked like it could maybe be babies,” Kearns says. Babies, indeed.
Her queenliness has had two babies so far, but naked mole-rats can keep giving birth for up to 24 hours, so it remains to be seen if there are any other pups to come. (Update: As of Tuesday morning, she’d had one more pup, making for a total of 3). Naked mole-rats can have up to 30 pups in one litter, but numbers like that are reserved for more experienced moms. Each time a naked mole-rat queen gets pregnant and gives birth, her spinal column stretches a little and makes her slightly longer, so she can fit more babies in there next time.
A first time mom will probably only give birth to between one and 10 pups, Kearns says. “My personal feeling is that she’s done for the day, but naked mole-rats are so weird you just never know,” he says.
And anyway, she’ll probably be pregnant again in a few days. “That’s kind of the point of being the queen,” Kearns says.
Fair enough. The queen is the only mole-rat that reproduces, so she’s got a big job on her hands. But she likes it this way. Queens sexually repress all the other females in the colony, as well as the males they don’t want to mate with, preventing them from going through puberty (even experts aren’t quite sure how queens do this).
Naked mole-rats have a 70-day gestation period, so in another couple of months the queen will solidify her position with yet more births.
But just getting to the first set of births wasn’t easy, Kearns says. In fact, it was kind of a bloodbath: the new colony transported to the National Zoo this summer was made up of 17 adult mole-rats. There are only 13 adults left. “Yeah, they’ve been fighting and killing each other,” Kearns says. “They have mole-rat wars to determine who’s going to be the queen or who’s going to breed with the queen. We’re hoping things will calm down a little bit now.”
The last casualty of the naked-mole rat wars was discovered dead in the chambers on Monday morning, just before the babies were seen, Kearns says. It’s up to us to imagine what incredibly high-stakes drama might have led to that death.
Kearns says that our their queen seems to have settled into new motherhood pretty well so far. She has napped much of the day on Monday, but she makes sure to lay nipples-up so her pups can nurse. Other members of the colony have also been observed picking up the babies and grooming them (fun fact: naked mole-rats eat each other’s poop, and the queen’s droppings in particular have hormones in them that propel her subjects to care for her young).
Keepers think things should calm down considerably now. Challengers to the queen can always arise, but in addition to having already given birth, the National Zoo’s queen is so much bigger than the others that a challenger has to be more or less delusional to try to engage her in physical combat. When they were last weighed over the weekend, the queen was at 81 grams. The other mole-rats are between 32 and 55 grams.
But in the brutal political world of the mole-rat, the hierarchy is never really secure.
“For today, we haven’t seen anything like that, any aggression,” Kearns says. “But when you’re a naked mole-rat queen, you’re always defending your position.”
Sounds familiar. I believe there were a number of news articles about this back in 2016.
I can sleep now
Kind of like High School
I have an idea they can pursue to gain some insight: It's taken feminists 50 years but they've managed to get a generation of men that never went through puberty. They should study feminists and there collection of soy boys.
Naked Mole-Rats!
Wow, that sounds dirty. Something you wouldn’t want touching you or anywhere in your presence.
On the other hand, it’s a good name for a Bar near a college campus.
Welcome to George R. R. Martin’s nature documentary.
That’s a pretty crazy thing. Queens “subduing puberty”
I’ll give ya a hint : It likely bites the young male’s groin until it severs enough nerves and tubes to end the process. Like Muslims.
I have seen similar dire if bloodless struggles among the women in offices I worked in.
I have seen similar dire if bloodless struggles among the women in offices I worked in.
Looking at the pictures, they definitely picked the hottest one.
Melvin, one of the mole rats who is not allowed near the queen, was heard to utter, “F*** the gynocracy! I’m out of here!:
Better looking than her though.
Sounds exactly like Democrats even down to sexually repressing the males and making them asexual or perhaps gay...
Please, no nekkid pics of Hellary or Nancy.
There was a papa mole, a momma mole, and a bunch of baby moles ... all trudging in a line through a tunnel.
Papa mole sticks his nose out of the tunnel and says, “I smell violets!”
Mama mole sticks her nose in the air over his shoulder and shouts, “I smell clover! What do you smell, children?”
And after that each baby mole took a whiff and announced what they detected in the air, until they heard a distant muffled shout from the youngest and last mole : “ALL I SMELL IS MOLASSES!”
I guess I have been living under a rock. First I heard of it and still do not care.
Hillary is the Queen...she thinks she’s a queen, and she is a rat and a mole.
“If you think living in the dark underground and fighting for your life is the way to go...”
Seems like that’s been the theme of more than one Hollywood movie.
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