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Reducing the naked mole rat to their admittedly ugly appearance does not do the animals justice.

Because the wrinkled rodents have properties that make many of us green with envy: They seem to have found the secret of the eternal fountain of youth and do not age.

You will not get cancer and feel no pain.

In addition, naked mole rats can do without oxygen for up to 18 minutes.

But the naked survivors also have a weak point: They depend on a high concentration of CO2.

In the fresh air outside their underground structures, they hyperventilate and have seizures.

Naked mole rats live in large colonies of up to 300 animals in the semi-deserts of East Africa.

They belong to the few eusocial mammals: Similar to ants and bees, they form states in which there is a strict division of labor.

The states are led by a queen who is the only one who is allowed to have offspring.

So that chaos doesn't break out in such a hustle and bustle, you have to communicate somehow.

Source: pa / blickwinkel / K / K.

Wothe

Naked mole rats have not only developed a language for this, but have even developed their own dialects.

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This is what a team of researchers from the Max Delbrück Center (MDC) for Molecular Medicine in Berlin and the South African University of Pretoria discovered.

For their study - published in the journal “Science” - Gary Lewin and his colleagues examined the chirping, beeping, chattering and grunting of communicative rodents.

With our study, we wanted to find out whether these sounds have a social meaning for the animals, which live according to strict rules in their own small state

Gary Lewin, head of the working group “Molecular Physiology of Somatosensory Perception” at the MDC

So far, 17 different calls from naked mole rats are known.

In their investigations, the scientists concentrated on a quiet chirping that the animals seem to greet each other with.

To do this, the researchers recorded a total of 36,190 of these sounds from 166 naked mole rats in two years.

These lived in laboratory colonies in Berlin and Pretoria.

Source: Colin Lewin

The research team developed a computer program that could distinguish the sounds of individual animals.

In doing so, they found:

We now knew that every naked mole rat has its own voice

Alison Barker, MDC neuroscientist

And not only that: the algorithm was even able to identify similarities in the sounds of a colony.

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“Each colony could have its own distinctive dialect,” explains Barker in a press release.

However, the researchers did not know whether the naked mole rat could also recognize each other by their voice and the different dialects.

To clarify this, the scientists examined how the saber-toothed sausages react to strange and familiar calls.

Source: Felix Petermann, MDC

To do this, Lewin and his colleagues placed a naked mole rat in a chamber that was connected to another by a tube.

In one box chirping sounds were played, in the other it was quiet.

We could observe that the animals always immediately went to the chamber with the played sounds

Alison Barker, co-study author

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When they heard the sounds of their own colony, they answered directly.

Otherwise they mostly remained silent.

To make sure that the rodents didn't just recognize their familiar conspecifics by the voice, but actually recognized the dialect of their colony, the researchers put the naked mole rat to another test.

They played them artificial sounds that resembled the dialect but not the voice of an animal.

And indeed, the rodents reacted to the computer calls as they did to natural ones - even when the scientists combined the sound of one colony with the scent of another.

So that means: Naked mole rats recognize their own dialect.

Source: pa / blickwinkel / H / H.

Schmidbauer

The queen plays a crucial role in maintaining the dialect, as the researchers discovered by chance.

"One of our colonies lost two queens one after the other in the course of the study," says Lewin.

"We found that the sounds of the other naked mole rats in this time of anarchy differed much more than usual, so the common dialect was much less pronounced." That only changed again after a few months later had established another female as the new queen.

As we humans learn our language, naked mole rats learn their dialects.

Young animals that came to another colony shortly after birth learned their sounds, the scientists report.

"Humans and naked mole rats seem to be much more similar than anyone could have guessed," says Gary Lewin.

"Naked mole rats have a language culture that developed long before humans even existed."

In future studies, he and his colleagues want to find out which mechanisms in the rodent brain are responsible for linguistic culture.

And until these results are available, let's say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye and goodbye.