Posted by Elizabeth Preston
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-excerpt-from-elizabeth-prestons-the-creatures-guide-to-caring
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With warmth, humor, and occasional run-ins with bodily fluids, science journalist (and frequent McSweeney’s contributor) Elizabeth Preston leads a highly accessible tour of cutting-edge research into how and why other animals and humans care for their young. She discovers that we evolved to raise our kids in cooperative groups, and that the tools we’ve inherited for caretaking aren’t only for moms or dads—they’re the basis for our human society.
Today, we’re happy to share an excerpt from The Creatures’ Guide to Caring: How Animal Parents Teach Us That Humans Were Born to Care. It is available to purchase at the fine bookseller of your choice.
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How a toothed snack cake can teach us about taking care of each other.
“Hola, chicas!” Miguel Brieno-Enriquez calls. In response, there’s a sound of frenzied scrabbling. We push through a door to meet a room full of naked mole rats.
In their native East Africa, these rodents live in underground colonies, with chambers connected by a network of tunnels that the animals dig with their teeth. At the University of Pittsburgh, Brieno-Enriquez houses his six hundred or so animals in clear tanks connected by tubes.
Naked mole rats are equally comfortable traversing their tubes forward or backward, like animate subway cars. In the lab or in the wild, their colonies are among the most cooperative mammal groups on Earth, which is why I’ve come to see them today.
What is a naked mole rat, exactly? Before I left on this trip, my seven-year-old described them to her grandmother with confidence. “They look like this!” she said, lifting up her shirt. “And you try really hard not to stare at them.” It’s possible she was just defining the “naked” part.
On the contrary, I’m staring closely at the ugliest mammals I’ve ever seen.
Two pairs of long, yellow teeth curve over the fronts of their faces. Except for a delicate set of whiskers, the rodents are bald. (“Naked mole-rats have often been described as hairless,” wrote the authors of a paper addressing naked mole rat misconceptions, “but their hair is simply very sparse.” Well, OK.)
The animals all seem to be wearing the wrong size of skin. It’s wrinkled everywhere, and bunches up when they move. They have blunt snouts and eyes like pinholes. They don’t see well and, in nature, they live in the dark—which is probably for the best. When I look at them I try, and fail, to stop thinking of a scrotum.
Still, they’re not quite as repulsive as I expected from pictures, if only because they’re smaller. Brieno-Enriquez says a former professor of his compared naked mole rats to Twinkies: same size, similar color, and no expiration date.
That’s because the shelf life of a naked mole rat is shockingly long for a rodent. Some live more than thirty years; one reportedly made it to forty. A standard Norway rat, even if you take it off the street and protect it in a cage, doesn’t live more than three. And unlike an elderly human or any normal mammal, a naked mole rat’s likelihood of dying doesn’t increase with each year of age.
The animals only rarely get cancer. In his own research, Brieno-Enriquez is studying the quirks in female naked mole rats’ ovaries that let some of them produce babies for decades without slowing down.
The most famous detail about naked mole rats, though—and the reason I’ve sought out these unfortunate-looking skin sacks—is that they and their close relatives are the world’s only eusocial mammals. Eusociality is the way of life you see in ants and honeybees, for example: extremely cooperative colonies in which most individuals can’t reproduce.
Or, depending which scientists you ask, maybe naked mole rats aren’t technically eusocial. Definitions aside, these animals have meandered down an evolutionary path that no other mammals have taken.
Naked mole rat colonies are led by queens. Brieno-Enriquez names each queen in his lab after a famous female character: Aphrodite, Venus, Padme Amidala.
Xochiquetzal, named for an Aztec fertility goddess, is easy to pick out from the rest of her colony. Her body is extra long and pear-shaped. Where the other rats are wrinkled, her skin is taut, stretched over sides bulging with pregnancy.
An average naked mole rat litter is around a dozen. Xochi, though, is an overachiever. Her last litter was twenty-one pups. When I call Brieno-Enriquez two months later, he’ll tell me (“Good news!”) that this batch was twenty-five.
Xochi will nurse every one of those babies herself. The tiny pink creatures look like miniature adults—or, really, the naked adults are just giant babies.
When the pups grow up in the wild, most of them will stay in the same burrows, an expanding family of brothers and sisters. As in a beehive, normally no one reproduces except for the queen, and one or a few lucky males.
The workers, who are brothers and sisters, dig tunnels and collect food. In the wild, this means roots and tubers that grow down into the soil. In the lab, it’s sweet potatoes supplemented with other treats such as celery and raisins. The largest non-royal animals tend to be the most aggressive toward outsiders, and researchers call them soldiers.
In addition to defending, digging, and foraging, workers act as babysitters. Although the queen does the most parenting, her workers help to groom the queen’s newest babies, huddle with them to keep them warm, and feed the babies their own feces on demand. The workers, in turn, eat each other’s feces. And the queen’s.
“That is kind of gross,” Brieno-Enriquez admits. “But at the same time it’s weird, because they’re really clean.” The animals are so fastidious that they maintain a separate chamber of their burrow just for going to the bathroom. When it fills up, they plug it and dig a new one.
In the lab, the animals still feel an urge to dig, some of them biting and scratching at their plastic tanks. Brieno-Enriquez tells me they’re also agitated because they hate hearing him speak English. “Chicas! Tranquilas, por favor!” he chides. (Although his naked mole rats are both female and male, he refers to them all as his “girls.”)
They’re also highly sensitive to smell. So we both change our gloves before he lets me hold one, because getting a whiff of a different colony on our hands would freak out a naked mole rat.
With the rat in my palm, I gently grip the base of her tail so she doesn’t run off, like Brieño-Enriquez shows me. He points out that the animal is a little bit cool to the touch. That’s because naked mole rats stay warm by huddling, instead of making all of their own body heat.
The animal is soft and wriggly, squeaking faintly in her colony-specific dialect. When I replace her, saying that I don’t want to make her nervous, Brieno-Enriquez tells me I would have known if I’d scared her, because she would have sprayed me with diarrhea.
Their usually calm demeanor is part of why the researchers who study the world’s ugliest, sparsest-haired mammals love them so much. “They’re chill. They’re sweet,” Brieno-Enriquez says. He also says the animals have helped him understand how a human mother feels: Even though his babies are hideous, he loves them.
They love each other, too. In one room, before the animals smell us, we find a great heap of rats resting together in one tank. They’re layered cozily, like a disorganized lasagna. Brieno-Enriquez says he sometimes wedges a sweet potato into one of the transparent pipes so he can watch the animals attack the problem as a group. They work together to gnaw it free and carry it to another chamber to eat.
Xochi, too, is liable to get wedged when she’s carrying a couple of dozen pups inside her body. “Sometimes she can be a little bit, mm—let’s say, kind of tight in the pipes,” Brieno-Enriquez says delicately.
Her workers team up to push her free, as industriously as if their queen were another yam.
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From THE CREATURES’ GUIDE TO CARING by Elizabeth Preston, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright 2026 by Elizabeth Preston.
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-excerpt-from-elizabeth-prestons-the-creatures-guide-to-caring
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