The Mole Rat Lab

After what was possibly the most refreshing night of sleep I have ever had, including a long sleep in, I got up and prepared to face the day. I was expected to show up to the lab around 2:30 or 3:00 pm, and although I planned on being up sooner I was actually almost late. I was given a brief tour and explanation of the layout, which involves a main work room with seven offset rooms filled to the ceiling with colonies of mole rats. An office and front room made up the rest of the lab building. The rest of this post is to provide more details of what the lab looks like, and how the mole rats are housed.

Each of the mole rat rooms has large, sturdy shelves at three heights. The highest one requires a ladder to reach. The colonies are built out of pvc tubing with windows cut out and covered with clear acrylic plastic. Zipties and duct tape are mainstays in the construction. The largest colonies take up an entire shelf, which is probably around 2' x 10' (this is a horrible guesstimation). The other colonies are half the size or less, depending on the number of individuals.

  Although a couple of the rooms still have shelf space available, of the colonies in existence currently there are almost 600 individual mole rats. The largest colony currently has twenty-three residents. Wild mole rats live in underground tunnel systems in colonies of similar sizes, with a dominant male and female pair. The king and queen reproduce, while the rest of the individuals help out and remain reproductively stunted. Some eventually disperse to create new colonies or join existing ones. They are one of the few mammal species that displays this eusocial behavior, which is similar to bees and other insects. A theory as to why the helpers would give up their reproductive efforts is that since they are all related, they are still benefiting evolutionarily from the exchange. Also, the difficulties of life in a desert likely necessitate this type of cooperation. The research on the motivations and physical restraints of this behavior are being actively studied.

The lab colonies also consist of dominant male and female pairs that are given the chance to reproduce. Some of the first colonies caught from the wild are still in the lab four or more years later, with multiple generations born from the same dominant pair. Other, newer colonies are created from lab-born animals that are artificially paired together to reproduce. The maintenance required for so many animals is quite impressive. There are three locals that work in the lab almost everyday trying to keep everything clean and provide appropriate habitation for the mole rats.

Their primary tasks involve feeding all the colonies, cleaning the tunnel systems to help the researches observe the mole rats, and transporting fresh sand from the desert to boxes near the colonies so we can provide digging opportunities using upright tunnels. In the evenings, all the lab assistants and volunteers (right now there's six of us) split up the rooms and check each colony for food, and we fill the sand feeders in the colonies so that the mole rats have to dig and remove the sand to find food. We also check for new born pups, but I'll write more about that later.

All in all, the mole rat lab is quite an impressive, complex system of tunnels, mole rats, sweet potatoes, and binders full of data. The work to be done is scheduled one week at a time, and each day is full of tasks to be completed. The types of tasks range from observations of the animals to specific behavioral tests, bodily fluid collection, and x-rays. There is also plenty of data to be entered and imported to the database each day.