SCOTT DETROW, HOST: <\/p>\n
Naked mole rats – they are the small, mostly hairless rodents that live in colonies. They’ve got one queen and often have violent wars of succession, but that is not always the case. NPR’s Pien Huang reports on a colony that is doing things differently.<\/p>\n
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: The naked mole rats live in San Diego at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. They’re called the Amigos colony.<\/p>\n
SHANES ABEYWARDENA: Maybe they heard us, and they were like, OK, we’ll show you that we’re the Amigos and that we’re friends (laughter).<\/p>\n
HUANG: Shanes Abeywardena is a veterinarian and postdoctoral fellow at Salk. She says this colony started in 2019 with a half dozen naked mole rats.<\/p>\n
ABEYWARDENA: Queen Tere established herself as the original queen. Her and a male had reproduced, had their first litter.<\/p>\n
HUANG: In naked mole rat colonies, the queen is the biggest and the only one that has babies. Queen Tere kept having more. When the colony reached 39, there came a whole year where babies stopped surviving, probably due to overcrowding. Then came another disruption, a lab construction project forced the colony to move.<\/p>\n
ABEYWARDENA: During that time, we happen to notice that Tere’s reproductive capabilities stopped, and she wasn’t reproducing for a year.<\/p>\n
HUANG: At that point, Abeywardena and her colleagues thought Queen Tere would get overthrown.<\/p>\n
ABEYWARDENA: We had in the back of our minds, OK, is there going to be a violent war? Is there going to be aggression? You know, that’s what we were expecting, but that wasn’t the case.<\/p>\n
HUANG: Instead, two of Tere’s daughters started having litters, too. One died, but the other, Arwen, became the colony’s birthing queen. Tere continues to guard the colony even as she cedes the throne.<\/p>\n
ABEYWARDENA: Tere is doing great. She’s still queen grandmother of the colony.<\/p>\n
HUANG: The peaceful succession story, published recently in the journal Science Advances, bucks conventional wisdom. Abeywardena says it has advantages.<\/p>\n
ABEYWARDENA: These aggressive, fatal queen wars adds costs because you risk injury, you risk losing individuals, i.e., workers.<\/p>\n
HUANG: As the Amigos colony was changing queens peacefully in San Diego, there was a classic bloody coup at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Kenton Kerns is curator at the zoo’s small mammal house, where he says, it’s been a rough few years for their colony.<\/p>\n
KENTON KERNS: We’ll go two or three months, and we’ll go, phew, finally, things are calming down, and then violence.<\/p>\n
HUANG: But Kerns says the zoo’s last colony was calmer and had multiple queens living together peacefully.<\/p>\n
KERNS: When mole rats first came into zoos, there was a group that really studied them closely and sort of wrote the rules on what – how mole rats live. And the more we’ve learned about them, the more we realize that those were the rules for that group.<\/p>\n
HUANG: Kerns says naked mole rats flaunt all kinds of rules. They’re mammals but essentially cold-blooded, live a very long time and are resistant to diseases like cancer. It stands to reason that they would buck social rules, too. And in time, scientists may find that naked mole rats are more peaceful than they thought Pien Huang, NPR News.<\/p>\n
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)<\/p>\n
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