“A wrinkly tube of a rodent that ignores cancer, pain, and the passage of time.”

The naked mole-rat is, by appearance, a lightly toasted hot dog with teeth, and by biology, one of the most extraordinary animals alive. It lives underground in sprawling colonies organized like an ant nest, ruled by a single breeding queen while everyone else digs — a social structure almost unheard of in mammals. It barely feels certain kinds of pain, is astonishingly resistant to cancer, and can survive in air so low on oxygen it would kill most animals by switching its metabolism to run on fructose, like a plant. Most stunning of all, it doesn't really seem to age: a mole-rat is about as likely to die at 30 as at 2, shattering the usual rules of mortality. Cold, nearly blind, gloriously ugly, and quietly unkillable, it has become a superstar of longevity research.

Scientific name

Heterocephalus glaber

Size

Index-finger sized (8–10 cm).

Habitat

Underground burrow systems in the dry grasslands of East Africa.

Diet

Large underground tubers and roots.

Conservation

LC · Least Concern

Picnic threat level

Picnic threat: none. It's underground, ageless, and uninterested.

Kein keen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons · Learn more →