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In their stomach is a way of transporting the roots/tuber material they forage, back to the hive. Also we do not begrudge bovines for having multiple stomachs
by tejtm 8y ago
In their stomach is a way of transporting the roots/tuber material they forage, back to the hive.
Also we do not begrudge bovines for having multiple stomachs to break down cellulose why begrudge the NMRs for just having one but using multiple times.
Plus they are just amazing creatures, they are not more likely to die when older than when younger (that is huge)
which means they can get old, consider when you have ever heard of a 32 year old hamster.
They are the only mammal which resists cancer (that I know of) zero cases in the wild and only recently a couple of siblings who's colony lived at Disney for the last 50 years were found to have tumors.
They can survive without oxygen for several times longer than other mammals(18 minutes if I recall) they do this by switching from metabolizing glucose to fructose which I am not aware of any other mammal doing.
So what they do in the privacy of their burrows to achieve these incredible results is of no moment when compared to what we can learn from them.
- jenny_say_qua 8y agoElephants have strong cancer resistance relative to their size [0]. In general, larger animals have stronger cancer suppression mechanisms (elephants being even more resistant than their size would suggest) which makes sense given that larger animals have more cells, each of which has an independent probability of getting cancer - if they didn't have stronger cancer resistance, they would get cancer very quickly. I think NMRs are interesting because despite being so small they have high resistance to cancer, which is quite unusual. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4858328/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4858328/