Naked Mole Rats May Communicate by Eating Feces

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/naked-mole-rats-eat-poop/568519/?single_page=true

by pmoriarty • 8 years ago

45 20 8 years ago

dang• 8 years ago

All: This is a good and on-topic article but dread leads me to a caveat: if you comment, please resist the obvious internet reflexes.

Aloha• 8 years ago

Well, I can chalk this down, as one of the more interesting and disgusting things I've learnt this week.

Eww.

wolco• 8 years ago

Naked or hairless? Not too many mole rats where pants.

ridgeguy• 8 years ago

Naked because hairless, no pants in the evaluation.

More engagingly, it's also called a sand puppy [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_mole-rat

js2• 8 years ago

Life is so weird and fascinating.

MisterWalter• 8 years ago

“The whole idea that one organism would voluntarily ingest and be regulated by the fecal by-products of another,” she says, “makes us wonder what is going on.”

You and me both.

Past the squick factor though, it really is an amazing example of how many forms life can take.

kjeetgill• 8 years ago

Naked-mole-rat queens use their hormone-rich poop to govern their subordinates.
[The Queen's] subordinates take care of the pups, and they never make sex hormones of their own or become sexually mature.

Huh, so I guess the evolutionary strategy is that the Queen can give her subjects just enough hormones to get them excited about motherhood, but too few to become mothers themselves.

Also, what weird timing, "Minute Earth" put out this video 5 hrs ago:

  Why Do Some Animals Eat Poop?
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ubt2fl11v5E

tlarkworthy• 8 years ago

I find it interesting that even super alturistic communist animals seem to converge to having a nominated leader. It's seems fragile to me but biology is telling us primary elections are a reasonable solution to distributed control.

adiusmus• 8 years ago

A lot of animals (including us) have a common ancestor. That animal had dominance hierarchy characteristics. So pecking orders were already in our ancestors well before we even became anything like us.

golem14• 8 years ago

http://www.vetstreet.com/our-pet-experts/why-does-my-rabbit-...

More generally

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprophagia

iosDrone• 8 years ago

Yeah, yeah, yeah... Pier Paolo Pasolini made a movie about it.

LukeShu• 8 years ago

Fascinating! Though, I'm not sure I would call that "communicating".

Perhaps a more truthful title would have been: "Naked mole rat behavior may be influenced by feeding on hormone-carrying feces of the queen"

But that doesn't have the same appeal, and indeed: I probably wouldn't have clicked the article if it had that less click-baity title.

ChairmanLmao• 8 years ago

Still better than facebook, I guess.

tejtm• 8 years ago

In their stomach is a way of transporting the roots/tuber material they forage, back to the hive. Also we do not begrudge bovines for having multiple stomachs to break down cellulose why begrudge the NMRs for just having one but using multiple times. Plus they are just amazing creatures, they are not more likely to die when older than when younger (that is huge) which means they can get old, consider when you have ever heard of a 32 year old hamster. They are the only mammal which resists cancer (that I know of) zero cases in the wild and only recently a couple of siblings who's colony lived at Disney for the last 50 years were found to have tumors. They can survive without oxygen for several times longer than other mammals(18 minutes if I recall) they do this by switching from metabolizing glucose to fructose which I am not aware of any other mammal doing. So what they do in the privacy of their burrows to achieve these incredible results is of no moment when compared to what we can learn from them.

jenny_say_qua• 8 years ago

Elephants have strong cancer resistance relative to their size [0]. In general, larger animals have stronger cancer suppression mechanisms (elephants being even more resistant than their size would suggest) which makes sense given that larger animals have more cells, each of which has an independent probability of getting cancer - if they didn't have stronger cancer resistance, they would get cancer very quickly. I think NMRs are interesting because despite being so small they have high resistance to cancer, which is quite unusual.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4858328/

amelius• 8 years ago

Isn't this what happens at a cellular level all the time?

personjerry• 8 years ago

I feel like most animals are less disgusted by feces than humans are; I wonder if our aversion yet obsession with poop is socially constructed.

MrBuddyCasino• 8 years ago

I would suspect it is a function of how dangerous it is to eat the poop. For us it is risky to do so, therefore aversion evolved.

tickthokk• 8 years ago

New Silicon Valley trend: Bosses demand subordinates eat their feces.

Well, I read this article that said eating poop makes you a better worker so I thought I'd give it a shot.

syphilis2• 8 years ago

Observe this biological curiosity in action: the Smithsonian naked mole-rat webcam goes live in 24 hours

https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/naked-mole-rat

Naked Mole Rats May Communicate by Eating Feces

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