Why are naked-mole rats amazing? Couple reasons, none of which are going to contain the fact that I have a larger-than-life ceramic statue of a naked mole-rat in my living room. That's a story for another day. First off, naked mole-rats have a super cool social structure. There's one queen female that is the sole mater of the group, with only 1-2 males. This "eusocial" system is typical of termites, but highly atypical of mammals. This means the the rest of the colony has to work, get food, dig tunnels, fight off snakes- all without any direct reproductive success. Why do they do it? Naked mole-rats are highly inbred, so if they help out their brother or sister reproduce, it indirectly increases their own reproductive success- playing into Hamilton's rule of relatedness "rb-c must be greater than zero" for family members to want to help out (r= degree of relatedness, b= reproductive benefit of helping, c= reproductive cost of helping). Naked mole-rats are also super cool because they are the only known poikiothermic mammals, meaning that they aren't able to regulate their own body temperature. This means that whatever the ambient (environmental) temperature is- that's the body temperature of the naked mole-rat. That could be bad- but where they live makes it not really matter. They live in Sub-Sahara Africa, in little tunnels under the ground where temperature doesn't change all that much. When they do need to increase or decrease their body temperature- they merely change their position in the tunnel or cuddle up next to another naked mole-rat. Problem solved.

In conclusion, naked mole-rats are cool. Well, if they get put in a cold environment... :)