The four naked mole-rat youngsters at the Vienna Zoo Schönbrunn are now eight weeks old and measure around seven centimeters. They were nursed for about a month, and now they are already eating tuber and root vegetables with their strongly developed incisors, the zoo revealed on Tuesday.

Vienna Zoo Schönbrunn: Only the Queen Ensures Naked Mole-Rat Offspring

"The key to our breeding success was a stable social structure. The social system of the naked mole-rats is similar to that of honey bees: In a colony, only the queen ensures offspring. She is the only fertile female and suppresses the reproduction of all other females in the colony," says zoo director Stephan Hering-Hagenbeck. However, if the queen dies, unlike with honey bees, any other female can compete for her role and become capable of reproduction.

Visitors can experience the breeding success in the desert house at the gates of the zoo up close. Through a 70-meter-long glass tube maze, the young naked mole-rats can be observed together with the rest of the colony. The East African rodents spend their lives in underground tunnel systems and are almost blind. The air in their passages has a high carbon dioxide content. Most rodents live a maximum of three to four years, naked mole-rats, on the other hand, can live up to 30 years. They are also the focus of cancer research. This is because the wrinkled animals hardly ever get cancer.

(APA/Red)

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