Biology concepts – thermoregulation, ectothermy, endothermy, genetic mutation
Let me introduce you to the most wondrous animal on the surface of the Earth, or under the surface of the Earth – the naked mole rat, Heterocephalus glaber (hetero = different and cephalus = headed, refers to the fact that it lives in a colony where different members have different jobs; glaber = smooth skin).
Why, you ask, is this pruny thumb with two eyes the most incredible animal? Its odd looks and cutsie pink color belie the fact that this rodent is the most heinous rule breaker in all the biological world. It hasn’t meant a convention it wouldn't defy or a norm at which it wouldn’t thumb its nose.
 |
Meet H. glaber, the naked mole rat. He has teeth, pink skin, and a probable inferiority complex. The right image shows that H. glaber is not much bigger than the thumb he resembles. |
Look at yourself in a mirror. There’s hair on top of your head (well at least most of you). There is fine, unpigmented vellus hair (vellus = fleece in latin) that we know as peach fuzz, on your arms and legs when young and more coarse hair when older. You see eyebrows, and nose hairs as well. There is hardly a spot on us that isn’t hairy, save the palms of our hands to increase friction for gripping, and the soles of our feet, probably to keep it from tickling when we walk.
H. glaber eschews all this hair, but even he isn’t completely naked. From the picture, you can see the several sets of whiskers protruding from the wrinkly pink face that only a very devoted mother could love. The whiskers are crucial to helping the mole rat make its way in its surroundings, and therefore have not been lost, but why on Earth is it nearly naked?
 |
The horn of Africa, a great place not to be noticed, and hot enough to make underground living a plus. |
In its tunnels, body hair imparts no advantage, and can contribute to negative outcomes, such as carriage of parasites (this is why scientists believe humans lost most of their hair), overheating, or getting stuck in narrow spaces. The mole rat’s skin helps with this last problem, although it seems counterintuitive. Defensive lineman in football like to wear very tight uniforms so that the offense has nothing to grab a hold of, and it would follow that a tight skin on the naked mole rat would also help it slide around and not get caught on anything.
But the advantage to big skin is that the rat can turn around almost completely in its uniform, and dig from any direction to move itself along. Like the owl that can turn its head 270˚, the naked mole rat can rotate its whole body to get out of a jam. That loose skin is also helpful in traffic jams; mole rats can slip past one another in a tunnel without even slowing down.
The whiskers serve to guide the mole rat around in its dark environment. It feels its way, it feels for its food, and it feels other mole rats that it may meet in the tunnels. Therefore, the hairs it has kept serve a definite purpose, and one can see why there are whiskers along its entire body, as opposed to just around its nose (see photograph above).
Other mammals might appear to hairless, some even have it in their name, but they don’t match H. glaber for nakedness on an overall basis. Rhinoceroses, elephants, pigs, they all have coarse hair on many parts of their bodies, so they can’t compete for the world hairlessness title. Even marine mammals like whales and dolphins have some hair (mostly when they are younger) and have nose hairs as well (so I’m told – I never looked up a dolphin’s nose). The Sphynx cat is supposedly hairless, but its entire body is covered in vellus hair.
 |
| Dolphins have whisker as infants, and the whisker pits help sense electrical fields. The Sphynx cat was revered by the ancient Egyptians, which was fine, because the Egyptians shaved off most of their own hair. On the right, the Xoloitzcuintli was said by the Aztecs to guard human souls in the underworld. It looks intimidating enough to be good at that. |
Finally, there is the Mexican hairless breed of dog, properly called the Xoloitzcuintli or Xoloitzcuintle. While some of these dogs are completely hairless, it is a mutation rather than normally occurring. Hairlessness is the dominant form of the mutation, but even most of these animals have hair on their heads and tails. It is less common that the dog is completely hairless.
 |
Powder was a 1995 movie about a young man with alopecia universalis amidst other issues, like psychokinesis and a lack of sun exposure. |
But of all the animals mentioned, H. glaber takes the crown as hairlessiest! And it serves a good purpose. Along with living underground, living in a community, having smooth skin, living in a desert, and having a limited food source – these features have contributed to another decision nature has thrust on H. glaber, it is ectothermic! It doesn’t warm itself, rather it assumes the temperature of its surroundings. Is that any way for a self-respecting mammal to behave?
In the cold, hair traps air and keeps it close to the body to act as thermal insulation. However, H. glaber is communal, and they have larger chambers in which they all huddle together during sleep. Over the course of the cold desert night, the mole rats will rotate positions, so no one animal is on the outside for too long, much like penguins do in Antarctica. This keeps them warm and negates the need for hair as an insulator.
 |
An arrector pili muscle is attached to every hair on your body. You can see that if it contracts (shortens), the hair will stand up. Thank you, black cat for the Halloweenish demonstration. |
Being underground all the time means that H. glaber is protected from the most intense heat of the desert day and therefore needs fewer thermoregulatory mechanisms. So, the naked mole rat doesn’t need to dissipate heat via the arrector pilli action.
Finally, by practicing ectothermy, the naked mole rats reduce the amount of food they have to consume; they don’t need all that energy to produce heat and maintain a constant temperature. This works out well for them, since they live in the desert where there isn’t a heck of a lot food for them anyway. Could H. glaber have ended up as anything other than ectothermic? Its design just makes too much sense for its environment. We could learn a thing or three from how nature has tweaked its design.
And we have only scratched the surface of the ways that this rodent refuses to conform to established biological norms. Future posts will introduce more aspects of this amazing animal’s physiology, including longevity, pathology (or lack thereof), social structure, senses, immunity, biochemistry, and reproduction.
But you’ll have to wait for those stories. Next time we will turn our attention to a necessity of all life, sleep. But aren’t we learning that no single characteristic applies to ALL life – there’s always an exception.
For additional information, classroom activities or laboratories on H. glaber, animal hair, alopecia universalis, arrector pili:
H. glaber –
animal hair –
alopecia universalis –
arrector pili –
