Zoo Antwerp has a new addition to its menagerie: visitors can now explore a colony of naked mole-rats in a specially designed underground tunnel system.
Native to East Africa, these hairless rodents live in underground colonies with a social structure similar to bees and ants, headed by a queen who cohabits with a harem of four males and five female workers.
Each member of the colony has a specific role, such as babysitting, partnering, tunnel-building, cleaning, cooking, or protection. Their tunnels include rooms designed for dining, living, breeding, and sleeping, with a dead-end tunnel serving as their "toilet."
“Naked mole-rats are particularly unique due to their appearance,” zookeeper Anke explains. “They resemble pink, wrinkly sausages with long front teeth and a few hairs. They are thermoconform and rely on their environment to regulate their body temperature, warming up in shallow tunnels and cooling off in deeper ones.” Despite near blindness, they use their whiskers, noses, and hearing to navigate and dig tunnels with their teeth.
In the wild, naked mole-rats feed on roots and tubers, extracting moisture directly from their food without drinking. At Zoo Antwerp, they are provided with vegetables, a bit of fruit, and animal proteins.
Remarkably, naked mole-rats can live up to 28 years, an extraordinary lifespan for rodents, rarely showing visible signs of aging and possessing a strong resistance to cancer, which makes them valuable subjects for scientific research.
