Naked mole rats wage bloody wars of succession to choose a new queen — but one colony did something scientists have never seen before

Naked mole rat queens rule with an iron forepaw: these wrinkled, buck-toothed monarchs forbid any other females from breeding – that is, until they die and all hell breaks loose. Then the once deferential women rise up and fight bloody battles against each other to fight for the crown. They attack other females, killing the young and wreaking havoc until one emerges, dominant and victorious, to claim the throne and become the only breeding female in the colony.But at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, something unexpected happened: a queen peacefully passed her power to one of her daughters, without the need for death or violence.“We found that naked mole rats are capable of peaceful succession of queens, suggesting that these animals have greater reproductive flexibility than previously thought,” says Janelle Ayres, a molecular and systems physiologist at the Salk Institute, co-author of the study. a study on unusual succession. You might like Naked mole rats are eusocial, which means that they divide their colonies into breeding and non-breeding individuals - the support staff - the former consisting of a single female capable of giving birth. Similar hierarchies exist in hives and ant colonies. It's a rigid strategy that works in relatively stable and predictable environments, such as arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa, where naked mole rats live in the wild, according to researchers in the new study.But this arrangement is not without risk. For example, pups carrying the genes of a single female are not necessarily diverse enough to ensure that some of these individuals will survive the challenges of unexpected events, such as illness or environmental disaster. And violent enforcement of queen dominance is energy costly and can lead to injury, researchers say. So they wondered if there was any wiggle room in the hierarchy: Could these bloodthirsty creatures live and reproduce together?“For years we have known that only one female, the queen, reproduces and that queen succession occurs through violent queen wars,” said Shanes Abeywardena, study co-author and postdoctoral researcher in Ayres' lab. in a statement. “We wanted to see if multiple queens could exist peacefully.”Ayres, Abeywardena and their colleagues began their study in July 2019 with a small, well-functioning family, consisting of a single queen named Teré, a single breeding male and their four young, including a male. To simulate "the queen is dead" scenarios - without getting rid of the reigning rodent - the researchers created different scenarios that could change the queen's reproductive activity, from increasing the number of young in her kingdom to relocating the colony. It was the move, when researchers transferred the family, called the Amigos colony, to a new vivarium, that led Teré to stop breeding for almost a year.Get the world's most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.After that, two of her daughters (siblings from a 2019 litter) started breeding sequentially. One of them – named Arwen – peacefully assumed the role of sole Baby Queen in late 2025.The study, published today in Science Advances, suggests that peaceful succession is indeed possible in one of the only eusocial (and bloodiest) mammals, according to the researchers.This article was first published on Scientific American. © ScientificAmerican.com. All rights reserved. Follow TikTok and Instagram, X And Facebook.