It’s tough being a female in a naked mole-rat colony; they live a long life of servitude, maintaining the tunnels of their underground world and caring for the queen’s offspring. Within the colony, a single ruling female is responsible for all breeding while the rest are rendered to a life of infertility. Scientists have long wondered how the naked mole-rat queen maintains this status quo, and now they may finally have an answer. In a study published in Nature, a team of researchers suggests that naked mole-rat queens emit a chemical that prevents other females in their colony from reproducing. The compound’s odor induces infertility in the colony’s females, ensuring that the queen is the only one capable of producing offspring so that she may continue to rule over her kingdom uncontested. A queen’s rule Naked mole-rats are unique eusocial mammals, living in underground colonies that follow a strict division of labor and are ruled by a single breeding queen. This type of behavior is seen in bee and ant colonies but is extremely rare for mammals.
Unlike bees, however, any female in the naked mole-rat colony can rise to become a queen. When the naked mole-rat queen dies, other females fight for her position until a new one is crowned. Until now, it was unclear how the queen hoards all the power while other members of the colony are unable to reproduce.
