The Sabre-Toothed Sausage: The Most Amazing Creature Alive?
Meet one of the best adapted animals on the planet, and possibly the key to long life and a cure for cancer.
It is pudgy, white skinned, lives underground, has an exceptionally long life and has bad teeth. So basically, it is Bilbo Baggins. It can be described as a "saber-toothed sausage," which passes for pretty intimidating in the benign land of Hobbitown.
It is... the Naked Mole Rat.
Needless to say, these are some odd critters. They live in groups - which is rare for mammals of this type, with colonies of usually 80-100 individuals but up to 300 at times.
They also took a page from ant's book: there is only one breeding female, the queen. And she is big - roughly twice the size of the others. She mates with one to three breeding males. All the others in the colony, male or female, have their sexuality repressed. Clearly, this means they end up writing bizzare stories about girls on opium trips.
The social nature continues: small rats are workers, enlarging the colony and keeping tunnels clear etc. Larger rats are defensive or territorial.
And here is where it gets a little interesting, and a little bizarre...
The naked mole rat can live for over 30 years.. in captivity. Which means it lives far far longer than other related creatures of similar size - rats generally live for just 4 years.
The small wrinkly guys also have very little or no pain sensation in their skin and a low metabolic rate that allows them to live with limited oxygen.
To top it all off, the naked mole rat is highly resistant (and possibly immune) to cancer and many other diseases: "To date, there have been no reported deaths of cancer, and there are [teams] around the world that have kept and studied naked mole rats for decades."
In other words, if you want to live to be 400 or so, live free of cancer, and feel no pain, you should probably strip down naked, find a nice dirt tunnel system, and convince 99 of your best friends to join you... though I would recommend sorting out who was the queen first...
Alternately, you could wait a few years, because scientists have just decoded the genome of this amazing animal, and are hoping to learn its secrets (though as we all know, payoffs in genetic manipulation is frustratingly slow).
As a final note - these guys are actually from East Africa, and are not, contrary to earlier reports, Hobbits.
It is pudgy, white skinned, lives underground, has an exceptionally long life and has bad teeth. So basically, it is Bilbo Baggins. It can be described as a "saber-toothed sausage," which passes for pretty intimidating in the benign land of Hobbitown.
 |
| Num num num |
It is... the Naked Mole Rat.
Needless to say, these are some odd critters. They live in groups - which is rare for mammals of this type, with colonies of usually 80-100 individuals but up to 300 at times.
They also took a page from ant's book: there is only one breeding female, the queen. And she is big - roughly twice the size of the others. She mates with one to three breeding males. All the others in the colony, male or female, have their sexuality repressed. Clearly, this means they end up writing bizzare stories about girls on opium trips.
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| Now with more saber-tooth |
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| Are you brave enough to take this guy on? |
The naked mole rat can live for over 30 years.. in captivity. Which means it lives far far longer than other related creatures of similar size - rats generally live for just 4 years.
The small wrinkly guys also have very little or no pain sensation in their skin and a low metabolic rate that allows them to live with limited oxygen.
To top it all off, the naked mole rat is highly resistant (and possibly immune) to cancer and many other diseases: "To date, there have been no reported deaths of cancer, and there are [teams] around the world that have kept and studied naked mole rats for decades."
In other words, if you want to live to be 400 or so, live free of cancer, and feel no pain, you should probably strip down naked, find a nice dirt tunnel system, and convince 99 of your best friends to join you... though I would recommend sorting out who was the queen first...
Alternately, you could wait a few years, because scientists have just decoded the genome of this amazing animal, and are hoping to learn its secrets (though as we all know, payoffs in genetic manipulation is frustratingly slow).
As a final note - these guys are actually from East Africa, and are not, contrary to earlier reports, Hobbits.
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