Animalia > Chordata > Mammalia > Rodentia > Bathyergidae > Heterocephalus > Heterocephalus glaber

Heterocephalus glaber (Naked mole-rat)

Synonyms:

Wikipedia Abstract

The naked mole-rat (Heterocephalus glaber), also known as the sand puppy or desert mole rat, is a burrowing blesmol native to parts of East Africa and is the only species currently classified in the genus Heterocephalus. The naked mole-rat, the Damaraland mole-rat, and Mechow's mole-rat are eusocial mammals. It has a highly unusual set of physical traits that enable it to thrive in an otherwise harsh underground environment; it is the only mammalian thermoconformer.
View Wikipedia Record: Heterocephalus glaber

EDGE Analysis

Uniqueness Scale: Similiar (0) 
17
 Unique (100)
Uniqueness & Vulnerability Scale: Similiar & Secure (0) 
43
 Unique & Vulnerable (100)
ED Score: 33.39
EDGE Score: 3.54
Learn more at EDGE of Existence programme

Attributes

Adult Weight [1]  35 grams
Birth Weight [1]  2 grams
Diet [2]  Herbivore
Diet - Plants [2]  100 %
Forages - Ground [2]  100 %
Female Maturity [1]  7 months 18 days
Male Maturity [3]  9 months
Gestation [1]  70 days
Litter Size [1]  7
Litters / Year [1]  4
Maximum Longevity [1]  28 years
Snout to Vent Length [4]  4.331 inches (11 cm)
Weaning [1]  36 days

Ecoregions

Protected Areas

Name IUCN Category Area acres Location Species Website Climate Land Use
Kora National Park II 409762 Kenya

Biodiversity Hotspots

Name Location Endemic Species Website
Coastal Forests of Eastern Africa Kenya, Mozambique, Somalia, Tanzania No
Horn of Africa Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Oman, Somalia, Yemen No

Prey / Diet

Predators

Eryx colubrinus loveridgei (Sand Boa)[3]
Rhamphiophis rostratus (Rufous Beaked Snake)[3]

Range Map

External References

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1de Magalhaes, J. P., and Costa, J. (2009) A database of vertebrate longevity records and their relation to other life-history traits. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 22(8):1770-1774
♦ 2Hamish Wilman, Jonathan Belmaker, Jennifer Simpson, Carolina de la Rosa, Marcelo M. Rivadeneira, and Walter Jetz. 2014. EltonTraits 1.0: Species-level foraging attributes of the world's birds and mammals. Ecology 95:2027
♦ 3Heterocephalus glaber, Jennifer U. M. Jarvis and Paul W. Sherman, MAMMALIAN SPECIES No. 706, pp. 1–9 (2002)
♦ 4Nathan P. Myhrvold, Elita Baldridge, Benjamin Chan, Dhileep Sivam, Daniel L. Freeman, and S. K. Morgan Ernest. 2015. An amniote life-history database to perform comparative analyses with birds, mammals, and reptiles. Ecology 96:3109
Ecoregions provided by World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF). WildFinder: Online database of species distributions, ver. 01.06 Wildfinder Database
Biodiversity Hotspots provided by Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0