The Jitters

Whoah I am up way too early today. Before I go sit myself down in that lovely downtown Washington traffic on my way to the Arboretum, perhaps I will share with you a fascinating discovery I made at the Washington Zoo a couple weeks ago:

The Naked Mole-Rat.

These attractive mammals have the remarkable characteristic of (besides being hideously bald and looking like fetal pigs their entire lives) being eusocial. That's right, just like ants, termites, and killer bees, the naked mole-rats, who are neither moles nor rats, but more properly related to chinchillas (who are adorable) live in colonies ruled by a strict social hierarchy that includes one breeding queen, her harem of several breeding males, and bunches of soldier and drone mole-rats. It should also be noted that they have a toilet room in their burrow (which looks like a scaled-up ant colony, except its entirely underground). The queen was particularly disgusting, because, in order to accomodate the large number of births she is responsible for, her backbone has stretched and added more vertabrae or something and she looks like the stretch hummer of mole-rats. Its absolutely sickeningly fascinating. Read more abouth these fascinating little nasties here -- theoretically, there's also a naked mole rat cam, though it wasn't working for me. See also a quicktime movie here.