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Naked mole-rats are like the Rolling Stones”

What will be the last creature on Earth?
An evolution expert answers

Three people, one big question. In this edition: apocalypse critters.

3 min naked mole rat hero

Dr Chris Faulkes is an expert in evolutionary ecology and naked mole-rats are his thing. He works on social evolution in mammals at Queen Mary University of London. To tie in with Season 01: THE BIG BANG, TOPIA asked Richard: What will be the last creature on Earth? Here’s his case for the world’s strangest mammal – the naked mole-rat. These (almost) immortal “penises with teeth” live in a world that’s closer to Game of Thrones than you could ever imagine.


Dr Chris Faulks’ 3-minute noodles

“Naked mole-rats could certainly survive an apocalypse. They naturally live underground in nuclear fallout shelter bunkers and so they’re in survivalist mode naturally.  

Naked mole-rats are like the Rolling Stones. They’re survivors. They’ve been on the planet for between 20 and 30 million years, so they’ve already outlived many other species. If they were a band, It would be a band that has survived many generations with strong and feisty females. Now that might be the Slits, but probably more like the Stones. 

naked mole-rat three minute HERO

They’re suited to extreme underground environments. Living underground is a good strategy because you’re out of the way of predators in a stable environment. But if we humans were to go underground, we’d get another set of problems, because it’s energetically expensive to travel underground. Anyone who lives in London will know how much energy it takes.

They can cope with hostile conditions. Naked mole-rats don’t really need to come up to the surface at all and can survive in really low oxygen – up to 18 minutes without any oxygen whatsoever, which is pretty astonishing for a land-dwelling mammal – and they can also survive when there is high CO2 in claustrophobic tiny underground tunnels. 

They could help find the cure for ageing. They live a hell of a long time for a small mouse-sized rodent. Astonishingly, the record is a 37-year old naked mole-rat that lives in a lab in California (that’s ten times longer than a mouse). A substance in their wrinkly, stretchy skin may contribute to their cancer-resisting properties. If we can understand how they maintain a long health span, it can help humans live forever, if that’s your sort of thing.

They don’t need many calories or water. They just need some roots and tubers to get moisture from, because they don’t drink. If the whole world became a semi arid desert, as long as they’ve got some local plants in the habitat, they’d be fine. They have a very low metabolism and don’t need too much energy. Because naked mole-rats live in an extreme underground environment, everything’s just gone crazy with their biology. Today they can be found in East Africa in the arid regions of Kenya and Ethiopia and Somalia. 

They’ve evolved into an unusual social insect-like lifestyle. Bees, ants, wasps and termites live in a society with overlapping generations of helpers that help to raise the offspring of a breeding individual. Other mammals do it to some extent, like meerkats. Humans also have a grandmother effect, where we carry on living after menopause, and the next generation helps with the rearing of offspring.

They are socially tolerant and form bonds and affiliations. Your brain has to be wired up in a particular way in order to be able to live together! Rather like humans today, living in London with kids who never disperse because they can’t afford to go, these mammals have a predisposition to live as a family and tolerate one another.

Photo by Lorna Ellen Faulkes
Naked mole-rat
Behold the naked mole-rat side eye

Time’s up!


What’s so good about this?

Are you curious about the amazing superpowers of the naked mole-rat? Do you want to rock at life like these sand puppies? To get a deeper understanding of animal behaviour, check out Chris Faulks’ work with artist Julie Freeman on RAT Systems, which uses real-time activity data to look into the lives of a colony of naked mole-rats and their behaviour, exploring the data further in an artistic way through visualisation, sound, animation and kinetic sculpture. Things get weird in a very good way. You can follow them at @moleratsarego and @jozfreeman.

Meet the writer

Lisa Goldapple is the creative brain behind the world of TOPIA. The magazine’s Editor-in-chief has been creating shows for MTV, BBC, Vice, TVNZ, National Geographic and more since the noughties. Then created social good platform, Atlas of the Future. Today her desk faces the trippy side of Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, which might explain a few things. To understand how TOPIA came out of this rare brain, read ‘Mind Blown’. As she puts it: “If life splinters and you hallucinate triangles, make a kaleidoscope.”

Follow @lisagoldapple on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. (Open to freelance collaborations.)

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