Naked mole-rat queens use a chemical signal to suppress fertility in rivals

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裸鼹鼠女王竟然不是靠“欺负”同伴来维持独宠地位，而是释放一种特殊的化学信号，让其他雌性自动放弃生育能力。这群生活在地下的奇特生物，长相丑陋却寿命超长，过去科学家一直以为女王是通过暴力威胁来压制竞争者，但最近柏林的研究团队发现，这其实是一场无声的“气味外交”。裸鼹鼠视力几乎为零，却拥有比老鼠和人类都灵敏得多的鼻子，它们通过复杂的嗅觉信号系统来沟通和统治。女王只需散发特定化学物质，就能让其他雌性在不知不觉中失去繁殖能力，比物理镇压省力多了。这项发现不仅揭开了动物社会行为的神秘面纱，更让我们对化学信号如何影响生物繁殖有了全新认识。虽然短期内不会改变普通人的生活，但它为研究人类生殖健康、荷尔蒙调控甚至社会行为提供了新思路——或许未来我们能从这些“丑萌”的小家伙身上，找到调控生育、延缓衰老的意外线索。

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.Read full article Comments