Why Is the Naked Mole Rat So Weird?

take a deep breath that air that you're sucking into your lungs is 20% oxygen if that level fell to just 5% you would pass out in a few minutes and then your brain would start to die the brain is a gas-guzzling organ that requires a constant supply of sugar and oxygen take away the latter and neurons quickly start to self-destruct by the time this video finishes you'll be dead but there is one mammal that can survive for up to 18 minutes without any oxygen a doll it's one of the strangest creatures on the planet meet the naked mole-rat picture a disembodied finger now soak it in the bath for too long add teeth French short legs and a tail and you have a naked mole-rat these weird rodents live in the deserts of East Africa and almost everything about them is very strange they feel no pain they seem virtually immune to cancer they are exceptionally long-lived they have bizarrely miss shape and spur and they're so bad at controlling their body temperature that they're practically cold-blooded they also live in colonies a little bit like ants and bees there is a single queen who surprises the reproduction of all her daughters keeping them sterile so they can act as though workers and soldiers these colonies live underground and they sleep in small chambers the size of football in these really trance subterranean quarters oxygen levels can get really low but yet the naked mole rats cope with that just fine Thomas Park from the University of Chicago and his colleagues confirm to this by placing captive naked mole rats into chambers with just 5% oxygen conditions that will kill a mouse within 15 minutes and a human in even less but after five hours of this the naked mole rats were still scurrying about happily and park had to stop the experiment because well he wanted to go home even when he completely emptied the chambers of oxygen the mole rats survived by entering a state of suspended animation after 30 seconds they passed out after two minutes their heart rates crashed after seven minutes they stopped breathing and yet after eighteen minutes they were still alive and when Park reexpose them to oxygen they sprang back to life with seemingly no signs of brain damage other animals have their own tricks for coping with low oxygen deep diving species like whales and seals have special proteins in their blood and muscles that hold on to oxygen with particular tenacity some cold-blooded animals like freshwater turtles can cope by reducing their demand for the gas by lowering their body temperatures shutting down their metabolisms and even entering into a kind of reversible Coble but warm-blooded mammals can't shut down our bodies to the same degree which is why we quickly die when oxygen runs out the naked mole rat is an exception and it survives using a unique strategy oxygen matters to us because we needed to burn glucose the sugar that acts as our main source of fuel but the mole rats can switch to a different sugar called fructose which can be burned without any oxygen that's less efficient which is why most mammals don't do it but it's still better than nothing and by switching to this alternative fuel that mall rats can cope with the choking conditions of their underground burrows the naked mole rat might look strange perhaps even ugly to our arms but their weirdness is testament to the ability of animals to thrive in even the toughest of environments through adaptations that can quite literally take your breath away [Music]

Channel: The Atlantic

Views: 59,080

Keywords: the atlantic, animals, animalism, naked mole rat, oxygen, glucose, fructose, weird, bizarre, weird animal

Id: QCWaYU7nnR0

Length: 4min 19sec (259 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2018