The naked mole rat queen is infinitely fertile

infinite fertility. This is one aspect that distinguishes female naked mole-rats from humans and other mammals, American and Canadian biologists write in Nature Communications. It is known in humans, including mice, that fertility is related to the limited amount of egg cells that are produced in female fetuses before birth. But in the naked mole rat, this so-called oogenesis occurs after birth, in extremely large numbers. The eggs produced are also of very good quality.

naked mole rat (hetero-head) is a species of rodent from East Africa that lives in large underground colonies. As their name suggests, the animals do not have body hair and have very large front teeth, which they use when digging tunnels. At the head of each colony is a queen: she is the only one who gives birth to children, and she does so for the rest of her life. (The only other mammal that has maintained such an insect-like social hierarchy is the Damaraland mole rat in South Africa.)

This constant breeding is amazing, because the life of naked mole rats is much longer than that of other rodents. The queen gives birth to up to five litters annually, with about thirteen offspring at a time. This means that she could have more than 2,000 children in her lifetime.

The struggle for succession to the throne

It has long been known that a six-month-old queen of naked mice has an egg reserve ten times that of other mammals of similar age and size. But only now The delicate oogenesis process has been disassembled. For example, it turns out that all naked mole rats have stem cells that can develop into eggs, but this practically only happens with the queen. The initial stock of stem cells is also much greater than in other rodents: eight days after birth there are already about 1.5 million. In the queen, oocyte formation occurs in the following months, but stem cells also remain for later oocyte development – for example, they were found in the body of a six-year-old queen.