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 in their brains that makes them even weirder.
00:11Naked mole rats live in underground colonies and must huddle together to keep warm, because the rodents are essentially cold-blooded,
00:19meaning that their body temperature varies drastically with their environment, rather than being regulated internally, like ours is.
00:25All cooped up underground, naked mole rats survive on very little oxygen and a ton of carbon dioxide, which is expelled from the body as a waste product.
00:35But 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.
00:46Researchers found that naked mole rats actually seek out areas of their nests with the highest concentration of carbon dioxide.
00:54But why?
00:54Turns out, due to a genetic mutation, naked mole rats lack a control mechanism in their brains 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, the mole rats actually conserve precious energy stores.
01:16When the human brain is exposed to carbon dioxide, its electrical activity can also be suppressed.
01:21This is a great hack for mole rats to use underground, but it leaves the rodents prone to seizures if CO2 levels in their nests dip too low,
01:31or if they venture out into the air outside their nests for some reason.
01:35Some humans actually have the same genetic quirk that makes naked mole rats seizure prone,
01:41and these people 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 to study certain types of seizures in people.
01:56For that reason, scientists think that no one of them do this is a great thing.
02:02Being in a skyline would be the same.
02:04But it's going through a smaller movement.
02:05For that reason, scientists think that naked mole rats would get anything.
02:06They were very difficult to see, and they're very difficult to see.
02:08But when they're very vocal, they're very difficult to see.