Worker mole-rats dig extensive tunnels and scavenge for food. The queens are the only ones who breed, and there are designated males to breed with her. That’s not to say naked mole-rats live a peaceful, egalitarian existence. When one comes across a tuber that can be food, it doesn’t eat the whole thing, but brings it to the colony or leaves half of it to grow back for future harvesting. But, naked mole-rats live together in a colony of about 30, and they’re known for counterintuitive altruism. Wealthy humans can afford regular healthcare and nutritious food (and wealth corresponds with a suite of factors like race and gender), so wealthy people are more likely to be healthy than those with less money. While it’s also true that humans of different socioeconomic status have varying degrees of health and lifespans, Lewin didn’t think resources bore any importance on naked mole-rats. Humans, as far as Lewin knows, don’t have examples of morphoelastic organs. Larger spleens contained more of a type of cell known to battle infections than did smaller spleens. The spleen not only grew in size, but it also changed in molecular composition. Why it matters - This finding is a new example of something called morphoelasticity, in which the size and composition of an organ changes after it’s been developed. This is another example of morphoelasticity in naked mole-rats. “Does the animal get a larger spleen and then get a higher rank? Or does it only get a larger spleen when it actually attains a higher rank?”Īs the queen continues to birth litters, her spine grows longer. “The million dollar question is what develops first?” study supervisor and lab leader Gary Lewin tells Inverse. While there appears to be a clear relationship between social standing and spleen size, there’s a chicken-egg question about cause and effect. A big chunk of this paper is dedicated to evidence showing that large-spleened mole-rats were healthy, and not simply fighting infection. What’s peculiar about naked mole-rats, however, is that some perfectly healthy adults had enlarged spleens, and these adults were more likely to rank highly in the social hierarchy. Spleens are known to swell, a phenomenon called splenomegaly, when the body is fighting an infection because this organ houses a swarm of disease-fighting white blood cells. The human spleen is fist-sized, and resides above the stomach and under the left-side ribs. What’s new - While completing other research on naked mole-rats, this team from the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin unintentionally found a strong correlation between social status and spleen size in healthy rats.Īll vertebrate animals have a spleen, an organ that is part of the lymphatic system whose job is to fight infections and keep the body’s fluids in check. But new research published this week in the journal Open Biology from the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin examines a surprising correlation between one crucial organ’s size and a social factor within naked mole-rat colonies. That doesn’t only refer to the actual queen, who is the breeding and dominant female in the colony. Naked mole-rats ( Heterocephalus glaber) are size queens, it turns out. Rufus, the naked mole-rat sidekick from the cartoon “Kim Possible,” could plausibly still be alive today, and he might have a really big spleen.
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