The animal that feels no pain and barely gets cancer
This wrinkly rodent feels no pain, almost never gets cancer, and barely seems to age.
Which one is REALLY true about the Naked Mole Rat?
The short version
The naked mole rat lives over 30 years — about ten times longer than a similar-sized rodent — almost never develops cancer, and can't feel certain kinds of pain. When oxygen runs out, it switches its metabolism to run on plant sugar, and it lives in insect-like colonies ruled by a single queen.
Why it's so weird
- ✓The Naked Mole Rat can switch its body to run on plant sugar when oxygen runs out, almost like a plant.
- ✓The Naked Mole Rat lives over 30 years, roughly ten times longer than any rodent its size.
- ✓The Naked Mole Rat shrugs off almost every cancer and barely seems to age at all.
- ✓The Naked Mole Rat cannot feel certain kinds of pain, like acid or the burn of a chili.
- ✓The Naked Mole Rat lives in colonies ruled by a single breeding queen, just like an ant nest.
You could line up about 12 of them along a 7-year-old!
The full story
This wrinkly little rodent feels no pain, almost never gets cancer, and barely seems to age. Meet the naked mole rat, one of the strangest mammals alive. It lives over thirty years, which is roughly ten times longer than any rodent its size, and scientists struggle to find them dying of old age at all. Its body shrugs off most cancers, and it cannot feel certain kinds of pain, like acid or the burn of a chili. Even weirder, when the oxygen runs low in its crowded underground tunnels, it simply switches its body to run on plant sugar instead, almost like a plant. And the colony works just like an ant nest, with one breeding queen who bosses everyone else around. Wrinkly, nearly blind, and basically a superhero. Follow for more weird animal facts.
When a packed underground burrow runs out of oxygen, a naked mole rat can't make energy the normal way (burning glucose with oxygen). So it flips to a backup plan: it floods its blood with fructose, the same sugar found in fruit and plants, and special "fructose pumps" carry it to the brain. Burning fructose lets cells keep making a little energy without any oxygen at all, so the animal can survive up to about 18 minutes with none. Most mammals, including us, can't do this in the brain because we don't switch those fructose tools on the way mole rats do.
📚 Source: This Surprising Rodent Can Survive 18 Minutes Without Oxygen — National Geographic ↗In a 2017 study in the journal Science, researchers put naked mole rats in low- and no-oxygen air and measured their blood and tissues, finding fructose levels shooting up and the GLUT5 "fructose pump" and its enzyme switched on in the brain and heart — while the animals survived 18 minutes of zero oxygen and bounced back.
📚 Source: Fructose-driven glycolysis supports anoxia resistance in the naked mole-rat — Science (Park et al., 2017) ↗Watch the 45-second version
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“The Naked Mole Rat can switch its body to run on plant sugar when oxygen runs out, almost like a plant.”
“The Naked Mole Rat eats around twenty thousand termites every single day.”
“The Naked Mole Rat lives over 30 years, roughly ten times longer than any rodent its size.”