General Discussion

brooklynite

(94,552 posts) Tue Dec 18, 2018, 12:39 PM Dec 2018

After Bloodbath, The National Zoo's Naked Mole-Rats Finally Choose Their Queen

DCist:

At last, we’ve reached the conclusion of this scintillating drama: the National Zoo’s naked mole-rat colony has chosen its queen.

In case you’ve been living under a rock, let us catch you up: the Small Mammal House at the Smithsonian National Zoo is home to a colony of naked mole-rats, and for the last several months they’ve been engaged in a quiet—but brutal—battle for political supremacy. Naked mole-rats are one of just two eusocial mammalian species, which means they live much like colonies of bees or ants: one queen reigns supreme over everybody else, and challengers must fight and kill her for their own shot at rulership. Only the queen is allowed to reproduce, and her subjects are assigned roles as she sees fit (perhaps the only mole-rats with a better deal are the few lucky males she chooses as mating partners).

Back in October, keepers at the National Zoo told DCist they were pretty sure who the queen of this brood would be. One mole-rat was much larger than all the rest, and she was pushing and shoving her way to dominance without much obvious opposition from the others. But a human can’t know the heart of a mole-rat, and spokesperson Devin Murphy assured us that there could be a challenger at any time. “We won’t know for sure until [one of the mole-rats] has babies. That’s the only way to tell,” she said.

Well, the big day has finally arrived: just after 9 a.m. on Monday, zookeepers checking on the mole-rat colony discovered two tiny, pink, wrinkly nubbins nestled in one of the mole-rat chambers with some adults. Her majesty gave birth to two babies during the night. She has officially been crowned. (Take a gander at the lil guys on the zoo’s naked mole-rat cam).