Naked Mole Rats' Secrets Revealed

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By Marlene Cimons, National Science Foundation
posted: 12 March 2010 02:25 pm ET


This Behind the Scenes article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

It was the scientist equivalent of love at first sight.

"They had huge teeth, they ran backwards as much as forwards, and they chatted among themselves constantly," Thomas Park said of the first time he saw a mole rat during a post-doctoral year in Munich.

After starting his own lab in Chicago, he took his students on a field trip to the zoo and saw them again. "I thought they were great, and I knew right then and there that I had to get some of these guys into the lab," he said.

http://www.livescience.com/animals/nake-mole-rats-secrets-revealed-100312.html

snip:

"There was one occasion when a student was certain he had an apple bit," Park said. "It looked like apple, it felt like apple, but just to be sure — yes, he tasted it. It wasn't apple. From then on, we carried the sand out of the dimly lit room and counted apple bits in the well-lit hallway."

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1. Their secrets bared, so to speak.

But they didn't give them the opportunity to undermine roads or airport runways, as they love to do in their native habitats.