It's time for Damn Interesting!

And here's your host, Alan Bellows!

Thank you, thank you, and welcome to Damn Interesting, the game show where you get to be legitimately fascinating.

Let's get right to it. Here's your first question.

Say something interesting about altruistic animals.

Yes, Simon Whistler.

The Mole Rat Prophecies, written by Matt Castle.

The naked mole rat, heterocephalous, glabre, is fleshy, buck-toothed, and brazenly ugly. Yet, what these small East African

rodents lack in terms of good looks they make up for with an impressive array of biological

quirks. These misnamed mammals are neither moles nor rats, and in terms of their social behavior

are actually closer to bees,

wasps, ants and termites than to other back-boned animals.

They live in underground, cooperative colonies of up to 300 individuals, with a dominant

breeding queen and celibate soldier and worker castes.

Biologists have identified only one other vertebrate, the closely related DeMara Land

mole rat that uses this rigid, reproductive and social structure.

Until the late 1970s, scientists believed that this trait, known as eusociality, was confined to insects.

Naked mole rats deploy several impressive feats of physiology, including an apparent imperviousness

to pain, a casual disregard for low-oxygen environments, and a resistance to cancer.

Indeed, these unsightly creatures, both baffle and buttress, Darwin's theory of evolution,

in multiple, remarkable, and apparently self-contradictory ways.

Naked mole rats live almost their entire existence in teeming subterranean tunnels.

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