Skip to main content

The naked mole rat's furry cousin also feels no pain

[ad_1]


The naked mole rat gets so much press, you’d think it was the only mole rat in town. Sure those hairless weirdos can survive at oxygen levels below that of Mount Everest’s peak and seem to age on a ridiculously slow timescale, but that doesn’t mean their toothy brethren don’t also have winning qualities.



Yes, there are in fact, roughly 50 mole rat species. Though most of them aren’t wrinkly and bald, the mole rat family do seem to share another common trait: immunity to pain.



Now, that doesn’t mean you can stomp on their lil’ feet and not expect a yelp or two. It does mean that several mole rats have developed specific, strategic insensitivities to certain kinds of pain. Take the highveld mole rat.


You might think this is a dramatic photo showing a highveld mole rat about to obliterate its mortal enemy, the Natal droptail ant. These little bugs like to bite any invaders entering their nests, then inject a painful, stinging liquid into the wound. It’s an effective deterrent—but not for the highveld mole rat. This photo is more likely showing a rodent about to enter her burrow, which she and the ant share.



Though the pain of various insect stings might feel mostly the same to you, albeit varying in intensity, different venoms act on different molecular pathways. Your neurons have all sorts of receptors and channels dotting their surface, and some of them activate a pain response. Animals and plants take advantage of these pathways by producing molecules that activate that pain response, sometimes by activating a specific channel in mammalian neurons or blocking another one. Peppers and horseradish are both spicy, for instance, but the chemicals that make them taste fiery work differently. Capsaicin makes peppers hot, but horseradish (and wasabi) contain something called allyl isothiocyanate, or AITC. Each acts on a different receptor, even though you feel a similar kind of pain.


Naked mole rats don’t seem to feel the pain we associate with hot peppers or with extremely acidic fruit like lemons, but they do feel the sting of horseradish. Researchers wanted to test whether other mole rats have similar adaptations, so they analyzed eight species for pain insensitivities. They published their results in the journal Science. Most feel pain normally, but certain mole rats are immune only to peppers, like the Natal mole rat (no relation to the ant), or just lemons, like the Cape mole rat.



Highveld mole rats were the only ones that had an immunity to horseradish, though, and researchers think it’s tied to those gosh darn Natal droptail ants. If a furry little Highveld mole rat were to share a burrow with a stinging insect, it’s to your benefit to evolve a mechanism that allows you to become impervious to those stings. So they did. As the researchers note, they seem to have disabled the receptor that would normally signal pain from either a droptail ant or a piece of wasabi. Natal mole rats, their closest relative (at least that the researchers tested), don’t have this ability, so it seems to be an adaptation specific to Highvelds.



In fact, all of the adaptations these various mole rats have are specific to their particular circumstances. Acid insensitivity occurs in naked mole rats and Cape mole rats, which aren’t particularly close on the family tree, and in East African root rats, another type of rodent. The researchers aren't sure exactly what about each mole rat's environment would prompt this kind of evolutionary development (it could be a stinging insect, but it could also be an otherwise spicy food source). But the fact that relatively unrelated species have all developed the same trait would suggest there's an evolutionary force that's driving it, rather than this ability being a carryover from an ancestor.



So next time someone brings up a funky naked mole rat fact, remind them that there are other—far cuter—mole rats who have some awesome powers, too.




[ad_2]

Written By Sara Chodosh

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ice technicians are the secret stars of the Winter Olympics

[ad_1] The emphasis of this year's two-week-long Winter Olympic Games has been placed squarely on the Olympians themselves. After all, the stated purpose of the international competition is to bring together the world’s greatest athletes in a nail-biting competition across fifteen different winter sports. But before the curlers, skiers, and skaters even arrived in Pyeongchang, South Korea, the Olympians of the ice technician world were already a few weeks deep in a competition of their own. Mark Callan of the World Curling Federation and Markus Aschauer of the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation both say they’re hoping to make the best ice the Winter Olympics have ever seen. To transform the barren concrete jungle of existing tracks and arenas into an ice- and snow-covered wonderland is an enormous undertaking. And it takes a keen understanding of the physics and chemistry that keeps frozen precipitation pristine. Curling Callan has been making and maintaining ic...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to avoid the mid-movie bathroom break

[ad_1] Long movies and the urge to pee have been linked since the early days of cinema. Sixty-three years before Avengers: Endgame and its three-hour runtime, moviegoers settled in for nearly four hours of The Ten Commandments . “There will be an intermission,” director Cecil B. DeMille announced during the movie’s introduction. And audiences’ bladders were relieved. On average, movies aren’t getting longer, but they also don’t come with a predetermined bathroom break. That means when nature calls, you’ve got to either sit in growing discomfort or gamble on the best time to run to the restroom. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and for most people, setting your body to “do not disturb” is fairly simple. Go before the show The first piece of advice is also the easiest: pee before the movie starts. Generally, healthy adults urinate every 3-4 hours, so the longer a movie runs, the more urgent it becomes to reset your internal p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Charted: Here's how much your food waste hurts the environment

[ad_1] Our species is pretty good at wasting food. Some we discard at the farm for being undersized or oddly shaped. Others we allow to decay in their shipping containers, thrown away before they even reach shelves. We leave even more foodstuffs wasting away in grocery stores, often by letting it sit there until it reaches its sell-by date. As consumers, we don’t have much control over most of the process that brings our food to the grocery store, but we do have control over how much food we personally waste. Let's face it: We’ve all found liquified lettuce in our veggie drawers. Don't fret. It's arguably impossible to consume 100 percent of the food we buy. But a healthy reminder of the effect food waste has on the environment might help us all to be more conscious of the amount of food we eat—and don't eat. Consumer food waste varies extensively depending on the area. In South and Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that only around ...
Post a Comment
Read more