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The discovery answers a question that has lingered since scientists recognized these buck-toothed rodents as one of the few mammals that live like social insects. How does one female silence the fertility of dozens of others? <\/p>\n
It is the first identified queen-derived chemical signal that suppresses reproduction in a eusocial mammal, much as queen pheromones do in ants and bees.<\/p>\n
Life under one queen<\/p>\n
Naked mole-rats live in a way that almost no other mammal does. Colonies of the wrinkled, nearly blind rodents can hold dozens of animals, yet only one female breeds \u2013 the queen.<\/p>\n
Everyone else digs, forages and rears the pups while their own reproduction stays switched off. Biologists call that shutdown reproductive suppression.<\/p>\n
Paired with a single breeding queen, this suppression produces a kind of social structure known as eusociality<\/a>. It is common in ants, termites and bees, but vanishingly rare among mammals.<\/p>\n Researchers have known about this pecking order for decades. A 1981 study<\/a> first described the naked mole-rat as a mammal that breeds like a social insect. <\/p>\n Ever since then, researchers have puzzled over how the queen enforces this cooperation. Her presence alone keeps the rest infertile, and losing her lifts the block.<\/p>\n Eusocial colony relies on cooperation<\/p>\n Professor Gary Lewin<\/a>, a neuroscientist at the Max Delbr\u00fcck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC<\/a>) in Berlin, has studied these animals for the better part of two decades.<\/p>\n What draws him is how completely they cooperate. In eusocial animals, this behavior is central to the species\u2019 survival.<\/p>\n Asked by Earth.com what else stood out in the work, Lewin said, \u201cDemocracies do not seem to exist in the animal kingdom!\u201d His team had long suspected that a scent lay behind the rigid order imposed by naked mole-rat queens.<\/p>\n Earlier findings had muddied that idea. Experiments that involved moving soiled bedding and urine from a queen\u2019s colony into the burrows of isolated animals had failed to keep them infertile. This argued against any simple airborne signal and left the mechanism a genuine mystery.<\/p>\n Tracing the queen\u2019s scent<\/p>\n To find the missing signal, the team collected the airborne compounds given off by hundreds of naked mole-rats across ranks, ages, and reproductive states.<\/p>\n Among the many molecules they logged, one stood out. It was plentiful in queens and nearly undetectable in the non-breeding males and females they sampled.<\/p>\n The compound is isopropyl myristate, an oily substance that is also used as a smoothing agent in skin creams. In queens it was concentrated in vaginal, anal, and mouth secretions. Levels rose and fell with a queen\u2019s reproductive cycle, and peaked when she was ready to breed.<\/p>\n Queen\u2019s scent molecule barely evaporates<\/p>\n Its chemistry explained a long-standing observation. The molecule is bulky and barely evaporates, so it cannot drift far and works only at close range. <\/p>\n That fits the queen\u2019s restless patrolling. In a novel maze, queens covered far more ground than non-breeders, as if driven to press the scent onto every wall and colony mate.<\/p>\n The animals clearly smell it. Isopropyl myristate set off signals in the nerves that carry smell and lit up smell-processing regions of the brain. <\/p>\n High-ranking animals went out of their way to avoid bedding laced with the scent, whereas lower-ranking animals ignored it. The ones steering clear were the females most capable of one day breeding themselves.<\/p>\n Queen\u2019s scent switches off fertility<\/p>\n Detecting the scent is one thing; being sterilized by it is another. The researchers traced the effect to prolactin<\/a>, a hormone best known for driving milk production. <\/p>\n High prolactin also suppresses fertility, which is why nursing mothers across many mammals struggle to conceive. In non-breeding mole-rats, prolactin levels climbed when the queen\u2019s scent was around and fell when it was gone. <\/p>\n The compound appears to hijack this ancient off-switch, holding the workers\u2019 hormones in a state that keeps their ovaries quiet and their fertility on hold.<\/p>\n To test whether the scent alone could do the job, the team paired non-breeding males and females away from their colonies. Pairs kept in clean bedding bred readily, and five of six females fell pregnant. <\/p>\n The pairs dosed daily with the queen\u2019s chemical did not, and none of the seven females conceived.<\/p>\n Testing the queen\u2019s scent in a colony<\/p>\n The more striking test came inside a full colony. After removing the queen from a group of 19 animals, the researchers added the compound to the bedding each day. <\/p>\n For 12 weeks the colony stayed calm, with no fighting and no scramble to breed, and the workers\u2019 hormones held steady, as if the queen had never left.<\/p>\n Then they stopped. Within a month the colony unravelled \u2013 prolactin dropped, ovaries reawakened and fighting broke out among the high-ranking females. <\/p>\n One attack turned lethal, killing a female, and a surviving dominant animal put on weight, became pregnant and rose to take the dead queen\u2019s place.<\/p>\n Echoes in insect colonies<\/p>\n The result draws a line between two kinds of society long thought to run on different rules. In ants and bees, a queen pheromone<\/a> keeps workers sterile, and researchers pinned down the first such compound in ants in a 2010 paper<\/a>. <\/p>\n Finding a comparable chemical in a mammal suggests both groups arrived at the same trick.<\/p>\n The scent compound was not unique to naked mole-rats. It showed up in the breeding females of several related African mole-rat species, though at lower levels, roughly tracking how strictly each species limits breeding to one female. <\/p>\n In people, the compound is also found in breath and in the secretions of nursing mothers, yet most of us cannot smell it. Scientists are no exception. Lewin refers to the compound by its shorthand, IPM, and said in an email to Earth.com, \u201cI cannot smell IPM so this is very open.\u201d<\/p>\n For Lewin\u2019s group, the scent adds to a growing picture of how these colonies hold together. The same team earlier showed<\/a> that naked mole-rats speak in colony-specific dialects set by the queen. A queen, it seems, governs her subjects through both sound and smell.<\/p>\n Where to from here<\/p>\n What was a mystery is now a molecule. Reproductive control in the most extreme social mammal runs, in large part, on a single scent that the queen makes and spreads herself. <\/p>\n The authors describe it as a kind of social hormone and see it as a lever for probing how prolactin and other hormones lock fertility on or off. <\/p>\n How the signal plays out in wild colonies, and why the queen herself stays immune to it, are still open for enquiry. <\/p>\n In reply to Earth.com\u2019s questions, Lewin said his team is now working to identify the smell receptor that picks up the compound. This should reveal how the whole pathway works.<\/p>\n Either way, the finding hands biologists a concrete chemical they can add or take away at will. That turns a decades-old question about how mammal societies stay ordered into one they can now test directly.<\/p>\n The study is published in Nature<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates. \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers have found that a naked mole-rat queen helps keep other females in her colony infertile with an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":302459,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-302458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/302459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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