Naked Mole Rats

Something about very cold no snow, snow days in the south made me think about the info I read up on a while back regarding naked mole rats. These would be very chilly days for them indeed and just looking at their nearly hairless images makes me want to turn my crocheted coffee cup cozies into little naked mole rat sweaters. Naked mole rats are African underground mammals with 30+ year life spans. Although they are mammals, like ants or bees, they live in colonies where there is a queen and a few fertile males and the rest of the naked worker mole rats are sterile. The smaller ones are tasked with gathering food and maintaining the nest, while larger ones are more reactive in case of attack. Of particular interest to researchers is that naked mole rats are resistant to cancer. This is because of an extracellular matrix in them, the gloop that’s a support for their tissues (like the fat below my skin) is filled with a substance, high molecular mass hyaluronan (HMM-HA), is cancer resistant. This hyaluronan acts as a lubricant and helps the naked mole rat squeeze through tunnels. The rats are so well adapted to living in tight places that they can almost turn a somersault in their own skin. It is not known if HMM-HA would lend its cancer protection to humans if human cells were able to produce it but it may have uses for patients with arthritis some day through cellular engineering.