 So in the wild, maked mole rats are subterranean. They live underground in a large tunnel-based system with several chambers. So they have nesting chambers as well as a toilet chamber. And we try to recreate that in the lab by making a series of cages, some small, some large, that are connected by tunnels of different lengths. We provide them with bedding material. We provide them with same sorts of food that have access to in the wild and then enable them to make their own nests. They'll always establish their own toilet chamber from a looking-after point here. It's really good that one cage becomes dirty very quickly. And the other stay quite clean. So you can maintain changing one cage regularly and you don't have to change the entire colony less frequently, which the animals like. The animals in the wild would spend their time excavating tunnels with their teeth. And obviously we provide them with tunnels and we provide them with caging because it's important for us to be able to look at and report on the health status of every individual every day. So if we have a room full of mud, the animals might be able to dig tunnels, but we can't see what state they're in. So we do provide them with different types of chew blocks so that they can gnaw away at things. And the thing we provide them to enrich their environment which we certainly don't have in the wild are running wheels. Now no one makes toys that are naked mole rat size and naked mole rats are a bit bigger than a mouse, but quite a lot smaller than a rat. Some of the mole rats will just be running very, very fast for very long periods of time. We don't know why different mole rats choose to do different things with the running wheels. So in terms of how naked mole rats communicate to each other, they've got a very diverse vocal repertoire. So if you go into a naked mole rat's holding room, you'll hear almost what sounds like birds because they've got this chirping noise they'll make, but they've got a whole variety of different squeaks and different chirps they'll make with each other. Baby mole rats will beg for feces from adult mole rats and that has a particular vocalization. So it's not just random squeaking going on, there are different vocalizations that mean different things, at least if you're a naked mole rat. So within the naked mole rat colony, you've only got one female that's able to give birth and if things are going well, she'll give birth about once a quarter. So the gestation time for a naked mole rat is about 72, 75 days. As a new queen, we'll have far fewer pups than an older queen. So in my experience, the majority of first-time mothers will give birth to somewhere between two and five pups. The record for a naked mole rat queen is 28. Here in Cambridge, we've regularly had animals give birth to 17, 18 pups. It's difficult to see exactly how many are given birth because they all look very small and pink and wriggling all together and because they form these large nests, we don't tend to go in and disturb them. So in the wild, naked mole rats are virtually entirely subterranean. So they live always underground and they eat tuba-like vegetables. In the lab, we give them a variety of similar type vegetables. So they get a lot of sweet potato, most of them are the squash family, but they eat most things. They love banana, they like sweet things like grapes, but tuba vegetables, they're the mainstay of their diet. So in the naked mole rat colonies, we give them their cages and tunnels, but there's another fact we really need to consider which that naked mole rats are poichalothermic. That means they're cold-blooded. They're unable to control their own body temperature. So whereas humans will sweat to cool down, they can't do that. They don't even have sweat glands. They are able to detect temperature differences though. So for example, the animals will always sleep in a bundle altogether to help conserve heat. Now where they originate from in East Africa and Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, when they live below ground in those countries, is a very stable climate. So the temperature difference between night and day, summer and winter is only about two degrees. So presumably through evolution, they've just lost the ability largely to thermoregulate. So in the lab, we therefore have to look after them very carefully. The holding room for the naked mole rats is kept at about 30 degrees with a high humidity just like they would have in the wild. So naked mole rats live in large colonies all together and they're social animals. So usually if an animal is healthy, it's engaged in colony activity without running around, grabbing food, chirping at the other animals or huddling all together. A naked mole rat that doesn't look so well will usually be one that looks a little listless. So they'll be walking around in a slightly uncoordinated way. They look rather thin and they're not engaging with other members of the colony. So usually a colony that everyone is happy in will be a colony that breeds regularly. If there's sufficient space, but also there'll be a colony where there is no fighting. So naked mole rats are known to fight amongst themselves and with the teeth they have, they can do a lot of damage. So a peaceful colony is one where you don't have any fighting, where everyone sleeps together, eats together and is just running around generally looking like they're having fun. So I think about how intelligent a naked mole rat is. It's difficult to know what we mean by intelligence, especially when you think about a small rodent versus a human. But I think when we're working with animals, something we often think about is do they know who a human is and do they know who a specific human is? And I think when you interact with the naked mole rats, generally speaking, they're quite a friendly animal. So you'll pick one up and if you know what you're doing and handle the animal carefully, they don't immediately turn around and bite you. And I would say from when I work with the naked mole rats and other people in my lab work, they might have sort of spent more time handling them. They're more tame in my hands with other peoples, but they're generally quite relaxed as long as you're confident in handling them. But I wouldn't say that any of them are particularly aware that I'm me when I come in to work with them versus anybody else as opposed to just being a confident person who works with the animals. It's not like my cats at home were very much aware that it's me who's come in and they want to come and say hello. So when we decided that we're going to use an animal for research, the animal will be humanely killed and they'll harvest the tissue that we want. So that might be, for example, certain neurons if we're looking at how the base of pain is different in a naked mole rat to say compared to a mouse or a human. We might also harvest the skin cells to generate fibroblasts which we can use for cancer research. I think the important thing for us to bear in mind with naked mole rats is they're very precious and significant animals. They live for a very long time and they're not as commonly available as mice. Therefore, we have to be very concerned that when we do an experiment, you do as much as possible with one animal. So we always make sure that as many different researchers wanting tissue from a naked mole rat are present to take tissue for their particular experiments. So it's not uncommon when we harvest tissue that someone may take the heart for experiments looking at cardiac resistance to problems associated with aging. Other people might take the brain. We might take certain sensory nerves working on pain. So basically we try to take as many parts of the animal as possible to support as many different lines of research. So from every animal, we get as much as we possibly can out of it.