Watch: These wrinkly, hairless rodents have a superpower that can save human lives
The creatures may have the ability to survive by behaving like plants when deprived of oxygen.
Humans could learn a few things from naked mole-rats.
Seriously. They may look fragile in their wrinkly skins but they have never failed to surprise researchers with their survival strategies, being resistant to, among other things, cancer, and pain.
A recent study has shown that the creatures are also extremely tolerant to low oxygen conditions.
Found in the deserts of East Africa, the bucktoothed rodents dig through hard-packed soil and change their body temperature to match their surroundings, all of this in stuffy surroundings with low levels of oxygen.
Researchers recreated a similar environment to study how naked mole-rats and laboratory mice respond. Within 15 minutes, the lack of oxygen shut down the brain cells of the mice, which died. The rats continued to move around for five hours.
When the oxygen was completely removed and replaced with nitrogen, the mice died after 45 seconds. The naked mole-rats fainted, but recuperated when returned to normal conditions.
Had the oxygen been absent for 30 minutes, the rats wouldn’t have made it.
These cold-blooded mammals have a unique survival strategy – their brain and heart cells release fructose into the blood to fuel metabolism.
Thomas Park, professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, believes that the cold-blooded mammal’s metabolism is the kind used by plants.
According to the journal Science, the discovery can be used to treat people facing oxygen deprivation during heart attacks or strokes.
Naked mole-rats may not be particularly pleasing to the eye, but their remarkable resilience has paved the way for remarkable discoveries.
