Mole Rats and Longevity
When you think of long-lived creatures, I bet naked mole rats don’t spring to mind first. Perhaps they should.
Some of the “hottest” research on naked mole rats today concerns senescence, or aging. Naked mole rats in the lab have reached up to 28 years of age. And it’s not just the controlled environments of their captivity that are doing this. Braude has observed mole rats in the wild that are 17 years and older. But these are the breeders. Lab researchers didn’t realize that in the wild workers only live two or three years.
And my favourite quote from the article:
For a rodent of this size, they are ridiculously long-lived.
