By Pien Huang,
When the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego got their first naked mole rat colony in 2019, the researchers named them the "amigos" — Spanish for "friends."
Naked mole rats are subterranean mammals native to East Africa. Since the 1960s, scientists have studied captive colonies in labs and zoos for their unusual living arrangements and their long, healthy lives.
The Salk colony's name was prescient. A few years later, they exhibited a peaceful transition that bucks the conventional wisdom on how naked mole rat colonies change queens — which is usually through all-out warfare.
"Maybe they heard us and they were like, okay, we'll show you that we're friends," says Shanes Abeywardena, a veterinarian and postdoctoral fellow in scientist Janelle Ayres' lab. Abeywardena and her colleagues documented the nonviolent changing of the queens for the April 15 issue of the journal Science Advances.