On the show Kim Possible there is a animla called a naked mole rat.
My son claims there is really an animal like this.
This is the place to come to find out.
They exist. There’s a great documentary that goes into a some detail about them.
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control by Errol Morris.
There’s also a lot of good information here. 
Sure, naked mole rats are cool. I go to the zoo all the time and I never skip visiting the naked mole rats and watching them squirm around in their little tunnels. Freaky-looking little guys.
Paul Sherman is a Professor of Animal Behavior at Cornell University.
“A Naked Mole Rat is first of all a mammal, but it’s one of the most unusual mammals on the earth. It has very little hair. In fact, you and I have more hair than it does. Nowhere on its body is the skin concealed by hair. But you’ve never seen a Naked Mole Rat because they never come above ground, and even the local people haven’t seen one. The thing that makes these animals remarkable aside from their sort of hideous appearance, with these great buck teeth sticking out of their mouths, is that they live in huge colonies.”
Audio link to the Pulse of the Planet show here.
That was a great movie…I loved it…(FCAOOC) 
This is prime Googling material.
Really.
wo.
Thanks, I was sure there was no such animal.
:o
Are naked mole rats the only physiologially differentiated (ie queens have longer spines) eusocial mammal?
Astro: what is “eusocial” ? I checked my copy (slight boast) of the OED, and did not find"eusocial". What does the word mean?
IIRC The naked mole rat is unique because (as Astro alluded) only the queen of the colony breeds. There are plenty of insect species like this. But no other mammals.
Vanilla I suggest calling local zoos. I’ve seen naked mole rats in Philly and at a zoo in Florida. They fall into the category of so-grotesque-that-they’re cute. They’re so wrinkled that they make the skin of a sharpei smooth in comparison.
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Getting out of GQ, I suppose, but am I the only person in the world who finds naked mole rats inexpressibly creepy?
One thing mentioned in “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” (which spent too much time on the lion tamer and not enough on the robotics for my taste), was how the naked mole rat infants had a strong impule to eat mommy’s poo. The colony would create a specific chamber for use as a latrine, to which the members would come and wallow. I was left wondering if this was all so that the blind mole rats would be able to identify their colony’s members by the smell of their particular intestinal flora.
All this concerns me as to my own obligations, since the Slithy Tove is a literary relative of the naked mole rat. And I prefer wabe to poo.
IIRC, the queen n.m.r. also breeds with her own sons. I wonder how it’s possible for the species to continue to thrive and resist disease, if that’s indeed the case. (Then again, that kind of extreme inbreeding might help explain their nakedness, blindness, coprophilia, and buck teeth, no?)
If you think naked mole rats are weird looking, google on “star-nosed mole”. Not such an interesting lifestyle as the NMR, but they definitely have the space alien look.
IIRC there is very little genetic variation in a colony. It doesn’t matter which male the queen breeds with as they all have nearly identical genes.
WAG on coprophagia. IIRC kaola cubs also ingest their mother’s feces. This is because kaolas cannot digest eucalyptus on their own. It’s actually broken down by a bacteria that lives in their digestive tracts. Cubs are born without this bacteria and acquire it by eating mom’s feces. I suspect something similar is going on with the mole rats. A dung chamber would serve as a place for the bacteria to feed and reproduce.
Blindness, Buck Teeth, and Nakedness
These are not in and of themselves negative traits. We’re naked compared to most primates, and we’ve done pretty well. Rats, mice, rabbits, hares, and beavers all have buck teeth. These are quite beneficial. Considering that they live in underground tunnels, blindness is no handicap.
Didn’t Spinal Tap do a musical documentary on the naked mole rat?
Inbreeding isn’t necessarily a detriment to a population. It will tend to cause recessive genes to be expressed more often than usual, but if there aren’t any seriously negative recessive alleles in the population, it’s no big deal.
Thanks, Astro.
