This Animal Survives 18 Minutes Without Oxygen | Gary Lewin | Episode 309

So I wanted to ask you a little bit about the natural ecology of mole rats to set up some of the discussion we'll talk about.

You've already mentioned a couple of interesting things.

So they live underground and they live in colonies.

So these are social creatures.

But not only that, their social structure is kind of bizarre with respect to other mammals.

It kind of resembles something like an ant colony.

Yes? Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

And bees as well.

So yes, you have workers in the colony.

You have soldiers.

You have the queen, you have her consort, the consort we actually call Latasha.

He's the only breeding male.

And we also have, you know, we actually think there are at least five different ranks of animals.

So from the bottom to the top, about five different ranks.

And so this is, you know, you have to think about where they live.

To understand the naked morat, you really have to know what their natural ecology is, as you said.

So they are extremely successful species.

So you will find naked morats on the ground in almost the entire of the Horn of Africa.

And the Horn of Africa is, traditionally speaking, Africa was always represented as much smaller on Western maps than it actually is.

So we now have these revised maps that show its actual size.

So Africa is really much, much bigger than most other continents.

And the East Africa, at least I got Chachi Beatty to tell me that East Africa and the habitat of the naked moron is about equivalent to Central Europe.

So France, Germany, Italy, Spain, you know, parts of Poland all put together, basically.

So that's a huge area.