Naked Mole Rats Have a Very Strange Status Symbol
In , the royals do not wield scepters or don crowns. But that’s not to say that their majesty is subtle. The toothy, pruney rodents live in close-knit underground communities of , ruled by a tyrant queen that refuses to be mistaken for just another balding pleb. She ascends the social ladder through a series of brutal battles, assuming her throne as the only fertile female in the group; she spends the rest of her sometimes decades-long life . “She is always shoving and pushing the other animals around” and will literally any subservients she meets, says Gary Lewin, a neuroscientist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, in Germany. It’s her way of keeping the colony’s lesser mortals in check—lest a lower-ranked female get any bright
