Naked Mole Rats Dig Carbon Dioxide - video Dailymotion

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3/23/2025

We expel carbon dioxide as waste. Naked mole rats bathe their brains in it to prevent seizures. The unique animals thrive underground but cannot handle the lack of carbon dioxide above.

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00:00Naked mole rats were already pretty strange, but now scientists have discovered a quirk

00:06in their brains that makes them even weirder.

00:12Naked mole rats live in underground colonies and must huddle together to keep warm, because

00:16the rodents are essentially cold-blooded, meaning that their body temperature varies

00:21drastically with their environment, rather than being regulated internally, like ours

00:25is.

00:26All cooped up underground, naked mole rats survive on very little oxygen and a ton of

00:31carbon dioxide, which is expelled from the body as a waste product.

00:36But now a study has revealed that naked mole rats actually need carbon dioxide to survive.

00:41The compound tamps down their brain activity and keeps them from having seizures.

00:47Researchers found that naked mole rats actually seek out areas of their nests with the highest

00:51concentration of carbon dioxide.

00:54But why?

00:55Turns out, due to a genetic mutation, naked mole rats lack a control mechanism in their

01:01brains that helps to keep its electrical activity under control.

01:05This control mechanism uses up a lot of energy to run, so by relying on carbon dioxide instead,

01:12the mole rats actually conserve precious energy stores.

01:16When the human brain is exposed to carbon dioxide, its electrical activity can also

01:20be suppressed.

01:22This is a great hack for mole rats to use underground, but it leaves the rodents prone

01:27to seizures if CO2 levels in their nests dip too low, or if they venture out into the air

01:33outside their nests for some reason.

01:36Some humans actually have the same genetic quirk that makes naked mole rats seizure-prone,

01:42and these peoples appear to be at higher risk of certain forms of epilepsy.

01:47For that reason, scientists think that naked mole rats might serve as a good animal model

01:53to study certain types of seizures in people.

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