Naked mole-rat queens use a chemical signal to suppress fertility in rivals
摘要
裸鼹鼠具有真社会性结构，群体中仅女王可繁殖。柏林马克斯·德尔布吕克分子医学中心莱温实验室团队发现，女王并非通过暴力抑制其他雌性繁殖，而是利用复杂的嗅觉信号程序。裸鼹鼠拥有约1200个嗅觉受体基因，远超小鼠和人类，且视力退化，嗅觉是其关键导航与通讯方式。该研究揭示了化学信号在调控社会性动物繁殖等级中的重要作用。
Naked mole rats are weird. They spend their lives almost entirely underground, are largely insensitive to some kinds of pain, can persist without oxygen for a long time, rarely develop cancer, and can live past 30 years, which is decades longer than similarly sized rodents. They are also eusocial, like ants, bees, or termites—in a colony that can hold more than a hundred animals, only one female, the queen, breeds.
We didn’t know how exactly naked mole-rat queens stop other females from breeding. For a long time, our leading hypothesis was bullying and violence, but that may be a bit impractical, given their kingdoms are vast networks of tunnels that can stretch for up to three kilometers. But now a team of Lewin Lab scientists at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin discovered it’s actually just one part of a sophisticated olfactory signaling program.
Running on smell
"It's very clear that mole rats actually have quite big noses and smell a lot," says Gary Lewin, a neurobiologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and senior author of the study. Naked mole rats have around 1200 olfactory receptor genes, more than mice (which have roughly 1,000 of them) and way more than the few hundred in humans. They're also blind. "They have to be able to navigate and move around without vision, so smell is one of those things that’s enhanced," Lewin said.
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