The Naked Truth About Molerats

They've been described as a hotdog with oversized teeth. Hairless and ugly as sin, they can be pushy and ornery when breeding is on their minds (which is quite frequently), and they have all the social graces of a colony of ants. The naked molerat is definitely not your average rodent.

According to Cornell professor of animal behavior Paul Sherman, "these animals break all our rules." In an article published in the Journal of Mammalogy, Sherman was discussing how the always-surprising little rodents defy the "one-half rule" of mammal moms by producing far more pups than they have mammary glands to fed. The molerat mothers don't seem to mind, although the less aggressive of her offspring may wish she were a bit more conventional. Supplied by nature with only about 12 "feeding stations," the typical molerat mom has up to 28 pups at a pop. Yet the babies don't break into food fights, and somehow, in the spirit of cooperation, they find enough milk to serve the whole brood.

In fact, molerat moms are not like any other mammals. Native to east African countries of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, the naked molerat lives in elaborate burrows and feeds on tasty tubers and other roots. They are the only mammals known to practice the "eusocial" lifestyle of ants, bees and termites. Like these social insects, they have a single queen rat who does all the colony's breeding. As in ant or bee colonies, the molerats also divide themselves into groups of worker rats and soldier rats.

Long admired for their peaceful, well-ordered lifestyle, the naked molerat has recently been found to engage in some aggressive shoving and the occasional fight to the death among females competing for the queen rat position. The winner of this "honor" gets to bear all the colony's children while being catered to by all the other colony members.

The shoving appears to be a kind of birth control mechanism that can be roughly translated as "Get back to work and don't you dare think about breeding!" The queen is the pushiest member of the colony, along with the one to three largest males who have the exclusive reproductive contracts.

Some other eccentric characteristics of these uniquely bizarre rodents is the presence of hair inside their mouths, although they are naked on the outside. Biologists speculate that these hairs have some cleansing function, what with all the dirt they dig through in the tunnels. The naked rodents are also cold-blooded - a rarity among mammals - and need an environment with very little temperature variation.

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